All of one day
Without of conversation
Without of lemonade
Without of the stroke
Of a horse and plough in harness
All of one day
Under dry skies of summer
Under nourished
Under touched
By a summer overgrown with rain
Most days I would try to write a poem; it is a practice, as I suppose is meditation, or smiling, or watching the world go by
All of one day
Without of conversation
Without of lemonade
Without of the stroke
Of a horse and plough in harness
All of one day
Under dry skies of summer
Under nourished
Under touched
By a summer overgrown with rain
Near on
By the Legbourne copse and woods
At the end
Of the public maintained highway
Clay soil
Turned over, over the corn-crop stubble
Crossed roads
Of footpaths and bridleways
A steel wind
Blows through the baring trees
Pursing over my neck
Driven through the car's sunroof
The sun shines in among my hair
Yes this is a vast time
Of blue skies and grey clouds
An afternoon's escape
Where, in slow sloped fields
Loud thoughts whispered
And nettles bent
As the door slammed
If I sit here long enough
The night will come
The rain will fall
I will have completed
Ex.1 Lucy Jones: Looking at Self
Ex.2 Mathew Shelton: Delineate
Ex.3 Derek Sprawson: Sojourn
Ex.4 Various Artists: Abstraction
Ex.5 Jesûs Mari Lazkano: The Curve of Destiny
Video Poem: After the Carrier (Funicular Railway up to Mount Artxanda)
Ex.6 Nora Fok: Seeing Dragons
Ex.7 Henri Gaudier-Brzeska: We the Moderns
Video Poem: Gaudier Brzeska Line
Ex.8 Various Artists: Degree Show
Ex.9 Pierre Deuse: Lumière et Intériorité
Ex.10 Various Artists: Ancient and Modern
Ex.11 Alice Maher: Natural Artifice
Ex.12 Various Artists: Poets in the Landscape
Extra: An interview with the poet
At the end of the grassy lane, past the row of terrace houses, over the top of Bully Hill, the old vicarage set back off the road, way into the distance. Overgrown stones, names faded in a new life that seems out of control. With a scramble the bramble is parted to reveal a past, a last life ordered with a hierarchy; ordered, but gone now.
Here I am in the morning with wisdom and the poetry of the saints
Alone with no one else around
No choir or congregation, alone with my past
Tiny words, of great ideas and inspirations, of winds and ghosts
Of heavens and constellations
Water colours of a smaller place and a simpler time
Where cart tracks trundled into meadows, trees gave shelter
And we had a candle for late nights behind the moon
Time resumes, caught on a stairway between the old and the new
The railway line runs east to west, carrying the few
The flight path north to south rather more consumes
My toes tingle, where do we call our home
With sounds that let us be single, walking, on the shingle beach
Or further, somewhere more easily out of reach
All the while my mind flicks in and out of groove
From one place and then to another
The rain falls at the slightest threat of sunshine
I am restless; without anything to prove
I am restless, without my life to smother
Reading back, just before melancholy
Flash forward to that second war
Of holidays and shepherds
With moons and trees, moons and trees
Artist, artisan, poet, musician or painter
You are one, whichever you breathe
Leave the washing and tobacco
Push the boats out into the sea
Sail along; holidays with shepherds
Under moons and seas
Sail along without of cause to grieve
Say belong; belong beneath the trees