Category Poetry

If music be the food of love then poetry may just be the language of emotion. Home for my own words and those of others who in some way inspire, inform, entertain or educate me.

Autumn

Colour-eating cloudWest wind-stacked silver strataFading green to black I love the easy discipline of Haiku. Just three lines: the first of five syllables; the second of seven; and the third back to five. It’s the sort of poetry you can…

Social distancing

Sheila is 85 years old. Sheila has dementia. Shelia lives at Ridgeway Lodge care home. At night she curls herself into ball and sleeps under a single sheet. Like an ammonite in a museum cupboard. Visitors need a PIN number…

Granite City

He didn’t have anywhere in particular to go. No time to be anywhere in particular. So he walked. Walked past the chain stores in the centre of town. Past the charity shops in the gaps. Past the empty shops on…

SODA FOR MILK

Where were you when the child was crying, mourning a loss not yet hers, but near, an inevitability? Were you safely tucked away in a cocoon of comfort, one where ignorance could be a justifiable excuse for your indifference? Etchings…

Nature’s Alarm Clock

I’m woken by the Dawn Chorus. Not yet the full orchestra. A solitary blackbird playing oboe (chirping is too unrefined a word for it) from the uppermost branch of the wind-stooped apple tree and the dot-dot-dot-dash-dash refrain of a wood…

Sound affects

I’m sitting face to the sun like a Spring flower listening to the sounds of south Shropshire. A wedge of cold air – a thin blue arrow at the horizon and as tall as the stratosphere itself above my head…

National Service

There was three things in Civvy Street wot gave me untold pleasure, Me Boston cut, me Windsor knot, and me creepers made to measure. On me first day in the Army, though, they gives me quite a scare, For a…

This train is for Cardiff Central

“This train is for Cardiff Central.” Blokes in ones and girls in twos. Some in boots and some in shoes. “All tickets please.” Punk with nose ring. Ginger hair. Babe in arms. Collapsed pushchair. “The next station is Stockport.” Kids…

Echo Chamber

His work hangs on the gallery wall. We hear its buzz. We’re in its thrall. Each piece still humming with the thrum. As strong as when the work was done. That clay was soft and took the mould Of artist’s…

Crosshands Cottage

Now as the dusk is drawing in Around these weathered cottage walls The birds sing out an evening hymn Their last before the darkness falls And carried on a gentle breeze Which shimmers through the grass and trees A haunting…