Poem: ‘The Painter’

The Painter

Climbing the dune,
wind heavy in our faces.
We squint (or do we smile?),
our laughs and quips
diffuse in the air.

Young legs carry you
ahead to the summit,
where tufts of green cling
to an existence. Then you’re
a sudden lithe silhouette

against a racing sky.
I revel in your victory;
your gentle hand hauls me
up close to ocean eyes,
an elfin smile, teeth

pristine like breakers
on the distant, crashing
shore, that white noise
filling our ears.
To look into you

is to look as men
have done for centuries.
Unchanging heart,
you’re the pearl left
nestling in filth.

So take a look –
can anyone steal time?
An hour here or there,
we leave our footprints,
no foothold anywhere.

I am the painter of this shore –
you are the model.
Again and again,
we return to wrestle
in familiar hues;

deep alizarin crimson,
yellow ochre, phthalo blue,
making it real. Stay in this
moment, we bless and bless.
It has to be you.

* Taken from the collection ‘Anonymous Lines’

The illustration is from a larger painting of a scene overlooking the North Sea, from sand dunes at Wells Next The Sea, Norfolk, England.

Poem: ‘Winter Sun’

Winter Sun

The weaker sun burns low
over stilled marsh and scrape.

Straight-cut dykes glow like
hot metal fissures through indigo.

Heavy boots crunch on ghosted grass,
breaking threats of enveloping silence.

By a glistening gate I pause, to gaze,
the pristine kiss of rime stiffens my hand.

The lone motion is my breath, brief clouds
vanishing in vasty air, to which I am inured.

A bleeding horizon yields dwarfed
silhouettes feigning heat, random skeletal

trees and pylons merely punctuate
before a distant church stump.

A sudden snipe breaks his cover,
rasping furiously over my head,

where I catch fleet Mercury gleaming
bright through icy blue.

* Taken from poetry collection ‘Anonymous Lines’, which can be found here: http://liten.be//nr7n9

** The illustration is from a current painting by the poet/artist, showing the marshland at winter sunset near Boston in Lincolnshire, England.

Distraction

The thing that’s killing me
is that which first caught my ancestor’s eye.
Until then, I was content to roam the far horizon,

to be that quivering digit in the African plain,
strolling and musing, simply taking my time
when it didn’t matter; crouching at pools,

fishing for food, picking up things which lay around.
You could say it was like a kind of Eden,
for which I didn’t care or mistrust.

But then one day – I can’t recall exactly when –
something sparked, like a piece of flint in the sun;
sharp, fetching blood and an idea.

The rest you know in its outlines;
when the shaping of some tool
turned the wise one into a fool.

*Taken from poetry collection ‘anonymous lines’

http://liten.be//iHKVl

Poem ‘Witness’

Witness

Deep in the darkest place
we feel a faint memory is
lurking unbound like a freeze
on the fast spinning world
a rare sight for we strangers
from the far flung parts
of tenuous space

We must have strolled
those ragged shores
leaving no footprints in the sand
and breathed in deep
the unbreathable air
before sentient life could
crawl out from the sea

We saw the infant sun spill
his light over jagged horizons
and a shattered moon
ascend into sparse skies
to ride across that curious
scatter of stars

Was it us who fostered
the mortal pain of eons?
And did we sanction suffering
from simplicity to sublimity
all borne through this weary flux?

That we were witness
when it began – is true
We will persist to its end
to see star stuff blasted out
when it all starts over again

* I’ve had a version of this poem hanging around since I was about 17. This is the latest incarnation and I’m still not satisfied.
* The ‘painting’ is a ‘photoshopped’ adaptation from another painting.

New Poem ‘April Promise’

April Promise

Full of April promise
so many times we’d disappear
to where the canal boats moored

make-believing one of them ours
a gypsy craft laden for a simpler life
We’d found our own place to dream

saw the naked sun step down to play
to dance on daisy-strewn fields
leaving us to lay by a twisting stream

cradled by heavy blossom trees
unable to face an unpalatable truth
The holes it burned in our maudlin minds

like never-healing wounds
more vulnerable than the blossom
which fell into torrents below

So it is that a few fine April days
are quickly gone
They never presage a fine summer to come

Unseasonal, I know, but those of us entrenched in the northern hemisphere might want to think of spring.

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