Take the chance
Take hold
Sometimes life
Makes the most
Of the situation.
The Book Day
Three boxes suddenly appeared
on the living room floor
Books cleared from a child’s room
Boxes filled with old friends
Books bought so long ago
So now my writing desk is surrounded
As I renew our acquaintance
Lorca’s Poet in New York.
Cesare Paves’s The Political Prisoner.
Opening the yellow pages
of Among Women Only
I catch the scent of the days
I worked in the steel works
And read it over and over again
on the way home on the train.
Rescuing is a goodness of its own
The dog had woken and was restless
And you said in the dark it’s an owl
Of course the dog knew differently
And persisted licking the fingers
Of my hand to waken me
Out of that place of deep darkness.
I followed her down over the stairs
And saw the cat play with the bird
And then dart away from the fluttering
In the curtain and the distressed sound
Of a small bird alone and confused
I took it in a quick actioned grasp
And felt its heart beating fast
In the darkness I felt its wings
And stretched each leg to ascertain
That none of those small bones
Were bitten through or broken
Then I let it loose and heard it flutter
And it flew away into the darkness.
Rescuing is a goodness of its own.
Adrift — spanishwoods
the cigarette smoke fades softly into the dark and humid night along this ridge in Penn’s woods– making my memories of flat Ohio landscapes and golden rolls of hay disappear, dissolve and drift upon the strong and swift Allegheny
Voices in Time by Pamela Ireland Duffy
For years, we sat in silence tearing out our eyes for fear of darkness, biting off our tongues for fear of lies for years fearful and lost whilst gaolers jangled keys and swaggered and echoe…
Frisson
It doesn’t have to be like this
fractured
when we share so much
It doesn’t need to be like this
brothers
We all have another way
together
Sisters.
Children.
Summer day on the hill
Summer day on the hill
A short walk out on the hill today
Making my way up the country lane
A mile and a half there and back
The Ash trees are weighed
With bundles of samara
The rowan berries
Filling beginning
To slowly change
To that bright orange
Hawthorns stacked
With umbles of berries
And the beginnings
Of that red blush
That will fill thrushes
During winter days
And oaks show
The small green acorns
That will fill and grow
And squirrels and crows
Will feed on them
When days turn cold
And the old crab trees
On that wet lane corner
crowded with tiny
red tinged apples
An old tree fallen
Lies on its side
With an eye watching.
RAC
Listening to the soughing wind
Out on the mountain watching the rain move in
From the Severn Channel thinking I was caught
Walking boggy ground on the old Miskin Estate
But I stood still watching as the rain grey shroud
Passing me by covered the dim domed lower hills
I found myself listening out there to the wind blow
Soughing its sighs through the conifer plantation
Blasted and flattened by a New Year gale that felled
The woodlands on the hill tops and frosted high slopes
So that in the morning it looked as if a battle or war
had broken out while we slept off the New Year party
It was a scene of desolation walking through forests
Like some Paul Nash painting of shattered Ypres trees
Fifteen years later the trees have still not recovered
The walls of the estate built to enclose common land
Have fallen too and are now used in places to make paths
Where the land is wet and poached by cattle hooves
But although these long dry stone walls have tumbled
We have different kinds of walls built to close us in
This relentless psychologised industrial consumerism
That inflicts its message on the first day of a child’s birth
You need, you want and you can’t ever get enough.
Poetry
In the “White Goddess” Robert Graves wrote that poetry – “Once a warning to man that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born….it is now a reminder that he has disregarded the warning, turned the house upside down by capricious experiments in science, philosophy and industry, and brought ruin upon himself and his family.” (From The call of the wild: Paul Kingsnorth The Guardian Essay Saturday 23rd July 2016).
Time takes time
There is no measure
For the correct time
To heal and recover.
So now healing
Is by measure
To heal and recover.
There is a quick fix
A couple of weeks
To heal and recover?
There is no measure
For the correct time
To heal and recover.
The soul ah the soul
The time to heal
The time to recover.
We talk of the mind
No talk of the soul
And the time to recover
There is no measure
For the correct time
To heal and recover.
We talk of the mind
No talk of the spirit
And the time to recover.
Wounds not visible
Wounds not measurable
Wounds not vocalised.
Wounds.
Time takes time
In its own time.
Celfypridd 