Exposure

The river flows
Over rocks and trees
It flows with vigour
As if life itself
Is being stripped
As a gift for the sea

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Cross To Bear

The sacrifice to love
Was found before we found it

Great big grey skies
Long stretches of still water
Eye make-up, sparkling glasses
Dancing to the rhythm of time
Two days of ill confined
Desolation, forty-eight
Hours symbiotically taken
From what's left of this life

The sacrifice to love
Was found way before we found it

Where ones become twos
To embrace and support, to
Give a light to the darkness, to
Drink coffee so many miles away
With time to pen a few words, which
Can’t quite catch either the complexity
Or the generosity of two souls who choose
Freely, to share their precious times apart

The sacrifice to love
Was indeed found, way before we found it

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Weighted

I might pretend
I feel to have
That last ounce of pretence still within me

Of course it will all depend
On the intimate senses
Of dependence which reverberate within me

To share such a stipend
To lean as we once lent
On those exquisite premonitions within me

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Turner

The unfinished works furnish my soul most of all; only time, time itself, has made them fashionable to hang now.

For in this time of plenty, when we have been delivered from all evil, and where we are now free from religion’s spell, we search out our spirituality in others evocations; to be found in their statements on everything, and nothing, to be examined through their portrayal of the escape from the great noise, and their dedication to the relentless pursuit of perfection; in this instance quelled to the calm seas, to the still waters, to the bathing light, that we too might imagine washes the angels.

And these are in a line after the moderns, after the post moderns even; it seems we have travelled full circle, gone beyond the moderns, morphed ourselves back, to the ages of enlightenment.

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Tidying Up

In the courtyard garden a young woman sweeps the leaves
She wears a short sleeve polo shirt, yet I am sure it is December

The wooden seats, and concrete tubs are swept around diligently
The last life of autumn’s falling are cleared from the path

One earring is apparently missing; and so the search begins
A logic is generated that says they ought to be together

I sit quietly, listen to the aeroplanes, in the busy Saturday sky
Photographs of the Queen, and The Queen mother, hang in the conservatory

There is no sign of Prince Philip; the church was bombed in the war
Christians, hotel guests and those seeking peace now populate this retreat

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