Paddle and splash

I am in my brother’s garden

Alone

It is early, it is a mid-June afternoon

My brother lives, I suppose you could call it country

But not a country estate, nor a county seat

Not in the grandest sense

Not a Chatsworth or a Balmoral

Or somewhere in the old East Indies

Anyhow

Here I am

Here and now and writing

Then

Could I ask you please

Just for a moment

To choose

To choose your own favourite location

And 

Then

For this moment

You may listen to the waves splash

If it is by the sea

That you wander

Or paddle or splash

Back here now

I sit on this wooden bench

A close fit two seater

Listen, I can hear the birdsong

I can hear the flap of wing

I can hear, can you

I can hear the buzzing fly

This is a time

Unplanned

Here I am

Alone

With nothing needing to be done

Nothing at all, now

At this time

Is expected of me

Can you imagine such a time

When all that is to be done

Is that which comes

From within your own imagination

Imagine

Time for thoughtful recreation

Spontaneous 

Blameless contemplation or action

I guess the grass was cut a few days ago

Anyway the shed is locked

No access for me to the mower

Unless of course I act wilfully

Break and enter

But why would I

When instead I can sit here

In the sun, in the shadow

Sit here

And write for you

While I listen

To those bloody wailing dogs

Next door’s dogs

Also listen

To the washing machine

Or spin dryer, or vacuum cleaner

Or even

From number 43

The dishwasher

And refrigerator

Hanging baskets and security lights

Give a place a comfort, don’t you think

Especially

With all these mid-day deliveries

And hooded youths

Whose school hours

Seem so different

To those of my own time

It’s the world cup this teatime

Last Saturday 31 million people

And you know that is an awful lot

31 million people, of my own country

Watched England’s opening game

In their homes

And in the more than public places

Where rowdiness endures

A win tonight

Almost seals our progress

We play Trinidad and Tobago

Which is in the Caribbean

And now I wonder

The noise having died down

Did we not once own our own country garden

Just as my brother owns this

Did we not

So so much more uniquely

Once own that island locale

So so much more completely

And for that moment

Did I listen to the waves splash

As by the sea I wandered

And paddled and crashed

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Onwards to sprinkled poppies

In the seventh summer

Slip, I dipped out of the trip

To see the pink flamingos

Now my seventeenth number flips

I’m clipped on the strip

Of fair way gringos

In between the innocence and the heartache

What seems the green grass, the second class

Of the mother, the child, the both without a father

In their seven rows

Clips of once wild poppies

Nipped in bud, for the county flower show

Now my seventeen insecurities

Drip into my shattered mind

Rainy days for the sipped sour wine of impurity

In between the hazel and the hedgerow

What seems the pasture, the swift past raptures

Of the other; the wild, the both without the hope

Or rather To be in the seventh seventeenth summer

Somewhere between home and away and eternity

Graveyards, birthplaces; endless timeless journeys

Trips to pink flamingos

Stripped bare the fair play gringo’s

Swathes wave, rave onwards to sprinkled poppies

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Luminous intensity

The sun strikes from high above

Thirty years or more ago

At university or in love

We spoke of Lumens

His law, or the glow 

Of Luminous intensity

Immense then the density

Of the obnoxious teenager

Leaning against the bar

In a daring unfair refrain

A peacock on the prowl

A scowl for all authority

Some things never change

And some things stay the same

Rising in the east

And setting in the west

Concave or convex

The arc between

The sunrise and sunset

Is blessed

Intense then the

Propensity of youth

Now spent, fenced too far

In darings unfair domain

A hippopotamus with a growl

Cheek by jowl to then remain

Some things never change

And some things stay the same

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