Not my event, but Siobhan Mac Mahon is a good friend and an excellent poet, so I think this will be a good one.
Event coming up
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Sometimes thinking hurts your head
Turns out a cloud’s a verb –
constantly coming into being,
and where does your skin end?
What’s the edge of anything?
Birds moult.
All these things – straight lines –
turns out they’re spirals –
things are twistier than you thought –
everything’s part of everything,
the air’s opaque,
the earth moves,
the leaves are starting to turn –
to change their colour-
time sweeps on.
There are stones in the river
sudden humps and hollows,
but we can’t see them,
and the air’s a landscape,
hills and valleys,
everything’s going all the time,
everything’s coming,
there’s no place to just stand.
A stream of consciousness for Grace at dVerse.
My midnight garden
My midnight garden
has a lavender shimmer
jasmine-flower stars –
and candles that glimmer –
see fluttering bats
and moths agleam
as the scent of roses
inspires sweet dreams –
the moon swings low
and the moon swings high
in a silver swing
made from lullabies
Victoria is back! Guest hosting at dVerse,where it’s quadrille night. Tonight we’re quadrilling about gardens.
earthweal guest weekly challenge: LOST WORDS
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via earthweal guest weekly challenge: LOST WORDS
Brendan at earthweal has given me the chance to guest host there this week. Earthweal is a growing poetry community focusing on the welfare of our planet. It’s attracted some great poets and some great poetry, and I’m proud to be part of it.
Climbing a beech tree in your parents’ garden
You will come to a place
where you can stop,
back pressed against the trunk –
a place where you can feel
your soft limbs branch and stiffen,
and the sap pulsing under
your skin, and all your thoughts
are nests and breezes,
and the taste of sunlight,
and the tree holds you here,
like a father holds a child –
Or maybe
your father hoists you up
onto his strong shoulders,
so you can peer through
the green leaves of his hair,
over the fence to where
next-door’s cat lolls in the sunshine
and the old lady jabs
at her flowerbed
and now two butterflies
spiral up towards you
and a bird swoops in
to land upon a twig
and no-one else can see
the tree-ness of you.
I’m hosting at earthweal this week, and asking you to think about how children connect with nature. Or adults, I guess. Beech is one of the Lost Words. There was a big old copper beech tree in my childhood garden – a person in its own right.
Writer’s block
I have
no words
to give you
the moon sucked them from my lips
the wind blew them from my throat
the jackdaw flapped away with them
each cloud stole a syllable or two
so that now
it’s raining
poems
Lillian is hosting atdVersetonight. It’s Open Link Night.
Look out of the window
August is a dull month in this garden,
just marking time – the fade
between the flowers and the fruit
but that one corner’s still alight –
West Cork – the fuchsia and montbretia,
the red and orange, sudden shocks of fire
bright in the soft, sea-light,
rain coming in from the south-west
and the grass drabbed by summer
Peter Frankis is our host at dVerse tonight. This is the view from my window, and a poem to go with it.
Birthday haibun
I had a lockdown birthday – like, what, a quarter of the population? More, now. I had a birthday of supermarket chocolates and flowers, of home-made cards and second-hand candles, of Zoomed-in love. It wasn’t the birthday I planned, but it was OK. It was more than OK. It was wonderful.
roses fade
green chrysanthemum
lives on
A birthday haibun for Kim at dVerse. Cake by my daughter!
I’m driving to stand outside my mother’s house
and the radio’s talking
about locusts
blunt heads, big eyes
clouds of hunger,
blizzards
swarms plagues storms
and I wonder,
how heavy is a locust?
a single locust?
skin crisp and shiny
emerging from itself
yellow is such an ugly colour
and the rattle of wings –
how does that sound?
billions of wings, beating
and billions of mouths,
too much,
and all those thin legs,
scratching.
For Brendan at earthweal, who has given us the theme of “Strange World”. It does seem like we are getting down to some pretty fundamental stuff at the moment. Fire and flood and plague and locusts eating East Africa. Things are off kilter, to say the least.
Cliff walk – haiku sequence for dVerse
green shade
with one step forward
white sunlight
laughing child
small dog running
ears bouncing
“surf’s up, dad!”
this bench remembers
ocean view
small island
between golden beach
and blue horizon
white bird
waves rolling in
ocean’s pulse
I’m never sure if haiku are the easiest thing in the world, or the hardest. Frank at dVerse has asked for a sequence of them. We can count syllables, or write haiku that can be read aloud in a breath, using a short-long-short format, without a syllable count.
