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Friday, 23 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 11

You forget that you have been listening
As friends and silence drift and gently sway

Father and daughter laugh
This is easy conversation
The best of times
No more sitting on the fence

You forget that you have been listening
To tunes on the radio
Family preserved variations
Gulls back from the sea shore
Mottled cherry blossom 
Afloat on the breeze

That is all I could draw
Call it abstract if you will
But there is a go at tenderness
An attempt at insight
A feel for the message in a bottle
A search for a statement of intent

In between the French
And Spanish dictionaries
Serendipity plies her wares

Shadows of the sunset years
Angle-poise, poised upon the picture
Painted, painted just before the dawn

And that's where it stayed
Caught up in indifference
Trapped in some sensible profession
Shunted into the knackers yards
Left to become redundant, old iron
Until the sun rose on that cold day in December

Stillness, silence of the crystal, locked behind glass doors
Matched, as by the forces of equilibrium, by the matching cups and saucers
Jimmy yanked Harry's arm, you could hear the crack across the street
Passers by looked on with concern, had they never seen a dislocated 


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Thursday, 22 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 10

By the apparent call for stillness

The artist looks up
With palette knife in hand
Speed painting, in a pastoral style

Back to that day by the river
Two boys at play
Discovered by a father often absent

All through the night the grasses remain
Grazed by ponies, sheep and foals
The forthcoming darkness and silence
Asks that rightful ownership once again descend

Not cured, but stable
Almost no palpitations 
This time of leaving

Death at the roadside
Stops instant
The self-indulgent postulations

I walk to the beach
Paul and Dawn get married
Sunshine dried earth
Cracks the pond-side track
The steel band serenades

Alone in the shade
Of trees and scrub
Sand, more as dust
Fallen timber refuse
Flung far from the Atlantic

In the Tennyson lounge
A pen & ink, of Happy Days
Linked to the wedding celebration
In the sunlit flooded garden
Beneath the gold statue
Of Napoleon on his crazy horse



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Wednesday, 21 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 9

Slight breeze
Worn away boulders
Relics of the flood plain

The evenings horizons are transitory
What appears also disappears
Light falls exponential
Coldness gallops through

Strokes in haste; passionate youth
Joined together
By the pasts previous absence

Great stones, about to tumble
Balanced precarious
Dampness and cold
Sit close by, on the shoulder

Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo
Free of all other species
Old posts by the highway
Fine grass in silhouette

Tune in; zoom in
Smaller than the midge
Slower than the slug
Faster than the ant

Bah, bah, bah
As if in time
It is their turn

Deep on the moor
Rise and flight
Of the Canadian Goose
Surely not, not a Canadian Goose

Messages, or symbols, or dreams

A sort of heavenly occasion
Disturbed only


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Tuesday, 20 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 8

Trees
Horizon

I Sit, or am laid out, either way it is to take the humbler point of view

Yeos farm
Haddon Hills
Dunchideock
Robert & Janet
A good combination

Rock
Shared with moss
And the beginnings
Of a bilberry bush

Stems touched
Clung with water droplets
I wait for the artist
To gather his thoughts

Arches
Curves
Mist
Telegraph wires half out west

Quiet
Except for the babbling brook
Or the aeroplanes
On the cross Atlantic flight path

The occasional
Acceleration of a car
Travelling to or from the prison

A cavalcade
It is important to visit
While the light holds
For the portrait painter

Bent reeds


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Monday, 19 January 2015

The long and the short of a part of my life Volume 1 Page 7

Son number two over that range of hills
In cowboy black I sit alone
Almost on top of the world

Slight wind
Maybe a zephyr
Among the grasses
Across the page
Through my thinning hair

Aircraft noise, out of sight
We are dreamers, one and all
Cut through or cut into the dust
Party time, it is too cold to fall

East
And North
Further than the crows flight
Quieter than the crows squawk

It could be that night 
Summer evening up on Red Hill
That time, when
We were together

The sky was clearer
Yet I doubt any nearer
The time was dearer
We had no need to fear

Newly mown grass
Cocooned in bales of hay
Scent as fine as Yves Saint Laurent
White cotton blouse, weighed in

This is play
Time almost stood still
Smell of earth
All about the nostrils
Photographs
Of bluebells


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