Poems – Mud at the wall

THE CLOTHES WE WEAR

Constrained
Within the cut
Of a brand new
Small-shouldered coat
The arms flail awkardly
Bare to the air
While wondering how
To hide

LIFE CHOICES

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?

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