Life
Made a home
In a handful of dust
Set in resistant ground
Would the dry land
Withhold consent
A host rejecting
This foreign body?
Category Archives: Poems
THE BIRD THAT FINALLY LOST IT
I am the songbird that swears.
No tamed caged fowl, me
With garish green wings
No sir ! I rattle those bars
And I mean to soar
Over tower blocks out
To the cliffs and the sea
TRANSPARENT
Over the years
Our bright acrylic traits
Slide, dissolve
Pale into watercolour
Undefined edges
Fine lines
Soft colours
That fail
To arrest
CONNECTION IN A DUTCH JUNGLE
A wild bouquet
The exotic and the plain
Loosely grouped
Watered and refreshed
In a huge glass jar
Catching the light
Timeless words cascade
Leather-bound
On shelves as we dine
PENTECÔTE
You broke silence to speak
Through people
From the wrong side of the tracks
Using foreign words we can’t make out …
Tu as brisé le silence
Par la bouche de gens
Peu fréquentables, de langue barbare
Que nous ne cernons pas
HOLINESS
Today this is
A barbed and wounding word
Seated angular and cold
On a shelf way out of reach
However tall the ladder …
LOCKDOWN WINDOW-BOX
Leaves with brown paper veins
Have succumbed to dry earth
And the neglect of the sad
For months touched only
By the movement of dust
In the rays of an improbable sun
Hope hung heavy
When the world closed down
NEGATIVE SPACE
Roadworks and the anxious
Shout of inner voices
Fills all headroom
With concrete
Absence of noise
Dissolves the mortar
Pours back the oxygen
Of liquid air
THE VOICE OF SILENCE
There is the silence of air and space
In which breathing is a momentous act
And contemplation stretches like a long beach in the sun
Of limitless horizons
There is the muffled deadness which descends
Like the padded ceiling of a too-small room
Left windowless to the imagination
Which can no longer sing
NAME
Your name weighs heavy on the tongue, some days
It has been taken hostage by a foreign power
And rendered unpronounceable
Light years away from those simple lines
Traced in Aramaic on red sand
That say, without pretension, ‘I am here’
Mud at the wall 