Gentleness

The kiss, love and care entwined

Thank you for being a poet

Or at any rate someone indefatigable enough

To read your own words for our neighbour & friend

The kiss, care with love enshrined

Thank you for being a person

Or at any rate someone, exceptionally

Understanding enough, to put up with the poet

This poem is from the collection 

La Corbière

Pulled by the spray plumes

Subsumed by the outcrop of rocks

A sound foundation for the lighthouse

I escaped here when the noise rose

Not as a perpetrator you understand 

Silent, non-committal, more my usual stance

Infinite skies atop the endless sea

Vast expanses, mystery aimed at, within and without

Room beyond reason for all of my doubts

I stood there

On the rough moorland grass

At the start of the track to the shoreline

From this safe distance 

I watched boys play in the pools

I had no need of engagement

An irregular rumble of the waves from France

Occasionally a flurry; with the rise and crash

As though over excitement was in the air

A sort of ‘new shoes and fancy hairdo for the party’

Type of mood, it often lifted me

Brought me, back home, to the new noise of life

This poem is from the collection 

Ownership

I was so very deeply hurt

Laid on the bed

At a loss

I stared out of the bay window

Into the infinite leafless tree

In the neighbours garden

Of course I left

Flight or flight; no contest

I convinced myself of the end

 

I returned later

But only to collect

My permanent possessions 

Yet I could not countenance

Taking away the poster

It was, after all, given as a gift

Prestigious; a limited edition

An individually signed copy

Bang on the money, as ever

This poem is from the collection 

Hold It Right There

Hard in the early evening

Stiff as the light lifted before dusk

Virulent as youth

He might have shifted had she not been

Rain lashes the Tarmac

Crows swoop low across the carriageway

The Severn is browner

Than the ploughed brown fields of autumn

Wagner turns triumphant

Relapses into one of his mellower moods

Worn out roads welcome me back to Yorkshire

Sodium lights sold short on their sense of purpose

What would Mr Hughes make of this

In his Barbour coat & deerstalker hat

A trudge to the drudgery

Or a walk by Wilberforce’s statue

This poem is from the collection 

Smooth Over

Floss ball of summer

Strands of evergreen

Swathes of pickpocket daisies

I would write a letter

Something about the roundness of love

About how profound it feels somehow

To look back from now

Free of pain and anguish

Full of the loss of longing

The longing that settled

Into a mind filled

Those days by treasure

Paths and trails of smitten tales

Leveraged by the faint lines

Of our past times together

This poem is from the collection