THE HOUR BLUE

this is the moment
- there's one each day -
when dusk is deepening,

silence in the trees
(the birds have folded themselves small)
the wine is poured:

i want to raise my glass, 
smile at someone;
talk.  

it's nothing much.
it's everything.

THE ASHES SPEAK

all that is left of me is you:
do me credit.
achievements; dreams - grasped,
then lost: don't edit.

i was unkind: include that -
but marvellous too, don't forget.
i hid myself in words, so you couldn't find me;
all the same, we met.

cup my cold ashes in your hands,
then let them go.  as they billow past,
brush me off your coat onto the sand:
i was never meant to last.

all that is left of me is you:
so take me toward
somewhere i never really knew:
the best way forward.

MAGNOLIA STELLATA

this tree on its single leg

curtseying

to the glance of wings

as a bird flies through

its petals

caught up by the wind, fall back:

in the shape of a sword

ICARUS DOWNFALLEN

man goes flying

ground waits

man opens red heart goes flying

ground waits

man holds out heart-bird

ground swoops pecks it up

man rises light of heart free of heart

ground waits frowns

man rises rises

sun waits

ground waits sun waits

sea waits

man falls: sea wins

POEM FRAGMENT: TORN PAGE

a draft of an old poem of mine - probably from around 1995 - discovered on the back of a scribbled recipe.

DARK ANGEL

Someone has left a lily, tilted

in an antique flask - someone has painted

this annunciation before: the slide of planes

which descry the room, the collision of light

as if an angel lingered, beckoning –

having burned out the walls with its eyes.

The whole place now

stands open to brimming skies.

Leaving, the painter took his brushes. The lily

he’d found and cut with such reverence

he placed at the heart of the work -

then left the painting to compose itself. These walls

will never hold space the same way again,

because they have summoned an angel

to dispense the rain.

The room darkens

and the angel becomes more distinct.

A convulsion of light is its hand

burning the cup’s rim. All day the rain

has brimmed up there,

writhing and boiling, winding its dynamo.

The cup is taken: from an angel

with eyes through which rain pierces.

But had the painting shown any room

(since all rooms intersect) each would have held

an angel with its own annunciation. And wet tiles

with footprints leading away, and the soft drum

of rain on leaves.

Yet though in some rooms a lily, newly unclosed,

might lean - in others

the dark, inward-reaching eyes

would endlessly hold discourse with a rose.

Now with the unrolling of the sky and the light's wane

the thunder at last

brings down its harvest of tall rain.

TYGER, TYGER, FADING FAST

our world
is doing a slow fade.

today's young
don't want what we had;
they never do.
one lot clocks off, another clocks on.

you'd think
there was nothing to learn,
nothing to teach.

it's best to keep quiet
when we hear them
mapping the world and
finding tygers.

privately, i don't think
their tygers
are a patch on ours;
but i smile silently,
just as my elders did
when i staked my claim
to their world.

they've gone and i mourn
the loss: i think if we'd shared our world,
all our tygers
would have shone more brightly.

but so it goes:
each generation tucked up under
the earth of the next.
the tragedy is not that we die,
but that our worlds die with us.

one day
there will be no more tygers.
one day
there will be no one left to praise
their lovely faces.