Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Call to Prayer

Here the sun-loungers
Worship their own
Brown-fleshed god
With sunscreen
Soak up the words of cheap novels
Drift through consciousness
Like boats
Loose in the bay

A wind rattles the sunshades
Flaps their bleached white folds
Tosses the plastic lilo
Into the water
Where it also drifts
A small bird darts along the water’s edge
Dips its beak nervously
Into the blue-shadowed pool

Wailing voices rise and fall
Across the valley
From the loud speakers

On the mosque

Friday, September 20, 2013

On Geoffrey's Hill

Am I channelling Chaucer or kicking at the flotsam
and jetsam along the hard shoulder? Forget
those scribbled lines on bus tickets and travel vouchers.
Into the bin.

The moon’s umbra lost to fog
Smothered whispers and the trampling of hay
A curse. My laptop fails to charge.
An upturned pail.

Yo. Yo ho. Yo ho ho.
My sweetheart came clad
in the naked root of ginger. Barley shadows
shifting, unkind pearls strung around
her salty neck.

The Muses, lost in mundane operations,
Fetching the washing, sweeping the floor…
Their scalpels slice the beetroot so…
Exactly so.

And now? The thoroughbred that rushed
the windy fields like clouds, is slowed.
But, oh, what folly. The clasp is rusted.

The diamond lost.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Mother's House

A memory of my mother’s house
A deep, clear lake
Sharp with colour
And the smell of the woods around
But fragmented
Like gravel
Sprinkled on the water’s surface

I could almost stand up
And walk through those rooms right now
I could walk out
Into the overgrown garden
Hang from the rusty swing
By the unwieldy climbing rose
Crimson and overblown
Left to the cold wind
See my father’s shadow
Bending, pulling a weed

The house that we sold
I've passed it since
From the road it hasn’t changed much
The holly tree in the front garden
That gave so freely of its Christmas berries
Gone
The rooms and the garden

Stealing other hearts now