Our Finest Belonging

 An edited version of a poem I wrote in 2021 inspired by a Sorolla painting of wife and daughters lying in the grass. 

As we lay there, our grass bodies within the sea

of meadow; sweep of wind carrying us along,

flowers of rye. We, the droning bumble bees

in buttercups, the chirruping finches, chomping

cattle; sudden dartings within briary hedgerows,

rustlings, commotions but hunters’ silences too

and only a vague consciousness of the faraway

                                              cataracts of traffic.

How sumptuous the flow of light and warmth,

the sinuousness of our bodies in that current;

the colours of the field embroidered into our bodies.

We, agglomerations of the soil, but the criss-crossing

zeniths of nerve and muscle too:

at one with the swathes of breeze-blown beauty,

settled, nested into our finest belonging.

We Lovers

 

Our colours are bells;

we, lovers, live forever;

defy perspective;

grow from each other

into each other;

no beginnings nor ends

but running timeless,

seamless like trains

                  through air.

Sun in a Cage

 

Pearl-white, the day;

January frozen colourless.

The sun, golden in its cage,

a pint of lager in a man’s hand,

a quarter mile out on a frozen lake.

Light coming through a keyhole

from another world, perhaps:

Summer, honey-coloured warmth;

small enough to carry in a hand,

persistent enough to shine into my eye.

In Autumn

 

Light falling

like leaves

in Autumn;

you inside it.

Eyes grey

in their pools;

pale and thin,

dimming;

disappearing

among the wonderful

colours 

of rotting.

Same Face

 

Failing light soft as Autumn leaves

falling.

The year’s foliage becoming humus,

new soil;

smell of decomposition: fresh, dank,

mossy;

preparation of next Summer’s fertility.

You standing,

foot on shovel, king of the ridges;

colour

of last apples, ripening towards rot;

who knew

that inside the lungs were discolouring,

hardening

as Winter will curtail with sheets of ice;

or that I

would stand, years on, in dank November;

with same face,

watching for the robin in the nearby hedge.

Boned Trees

 

When they shake out the fields,

wring the cities,

we fall out,

boned trees.

How our Summers passed

and fell,

desires.

Left us gaunt and brittle,

fingers

still scraping the sun.

What Legitimacy?

 

Blasted to rubble,

and buried in it,

a child,

a baby dead before

arriving on the floor

of his own mind.

Don’t talk of rights.