There is this night time
Once
I’d stay awake
For three nights
without sleep
easier to evade
avoid
waking
hearing
that noise
slamming metal
and the crying
screaming
now
but then
now.
Never
Goes away.
RAC
Hearing
Imaginary
Imaginary
I read her posts
Sometimes
I examine
The images
The work
The texture
Of the glistening
Hue
The delicacy
Of words
A story
Stories
And muse
Over that first
Morning coffee
Of the journey
Of all the journeys
Imagine
Glaze.
RAC
Watching them fly in
Watching them fly in
I never agreed with it
Lack of emotion
I wrote something
After 9/11
Watching them fly in
Arriving in distress
Not knowing
What they’d been leaving
She had a brother
Working in the tower
A place that I’d known
A place that I’d been
She didn’t know
If he was living
The phone call
Came and she smiled
He was alive.
Long ago
I walked home
And heard
Felt
The explosion
My classmates
Fathers, brothers
Uncles, men
Had been lost
We use that word
Lost too loosely.
Killed.
Too emotional.
What have we become?
Stone pillars
Wooden Indians
Vacant
People who live
Vicariously
Just by television
I’ve lived in a time
That isn’t literally
Real or unreal.
I write
About emotions
The connections
People things times and places
Real.
Westerlies
Westerlies
I watch the skies
These days
Anxious
For the change
Noting the Westerlies
Return
And that blue
Of western skies
And the Cirrus
High above
It seems
To my eye
A kinder sky
In some way
.
RAC
Time to heal
Time to heal.
I wondered about the time
So pulled the sleeve back
That covered my watch
I was wearing two watches
I was puzzled by that
I had no memory
Of clipping them on
My browned wrists
The older watch
Doesn’t work
The replacement
Tells time fine
PTSD
Is like that.
Intolerance
Intolerance
I am completely intolerant
Of racism
I can’t remember a time
When I wasn’t
So now I’m listening
To those
Tired sad old lines
That begin
I’m not a racist but…
Time after time
Don’t they realise
That we
Fully understand
The subtext
what’s not being said
But is said
Opposition to immigration
is racism
And its fascism on the rise
Lets go back to the past
They incite
Empire
The commonwealth
And all that razzmatazz!
Go back to what?
Do pray tell
Workers under the heel
Racism in every way
we deal
with the outside world
women chained
to the kitchen sink
or thinking
forever of England
just breeding machines.
Go back to what?
No education?
No medicine?
No right to vote?
Silence!
RAC
Nightingales Bush
Nightingales Bush
Walking along
The short stretch
Of what remains
Of the old canal
I met a man
Who reminisced
Of playing
Here as a child
Canal cottages
Signal the past
Nightingales Bush
Another place
Another time.
RAC
The Somme
Brightening day
Brightening day
Grey mist
on green hills
Shrouding woodland
I watch bees feed
From flowers
Sage in a blue pot
And the day begins
To brighten
RAC
