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| Photograph by Josef Koudelka |
Thin as splinters,
butterflies
borne on white wings
like flags,
flitting over the hedgerow
like scraps of paper
wind-blown.
Dallying over the brambles,
wings
bright as lighthouses;
careless
like children playing
as birds watch,
beaks like mousetraps.
A gentle breeze,
the mottles of light and shade
continuously shifting,
pleasing the eye
as asymmetry does,
but continuously,
exciting the retina,
and cumulatively;
creating a giddiness ‒
optical intoxication.
This is written in the context of the ugliness of modern warfare, where population are slaughtered.
What Young Should Be
It should be a state of invincibility,
a guarantee of safety;
believing in the powers within;
I am up to it, all of it.
It should be a view of infinity,
a horizonless plain of time;
space for all the dreams,
and I have those dreams.
It should be painless,
rejoicing in the body’s capacities;
with exhilaraion in movement;
I break into carefree running.
It should be a flood of freedom,
an unstifled education in finding oneself,
revealing many futures;
and I have those choices.
I’m on the train, heading out of town,
passing yards and back gardens
with that unkemptness that would
never be seen on the street side.
And suddenly I think of smiles and
pleasantness; the gracious conversations
we present to people while inside
our opinions are stacked mum.
How, wading through the back gardens,
we might admire the front;
how we live in other heads
having developed in semi-independent ways.
The 21st century: a new level of madness:
men, I would not leave to baby-sit my child,
with the shadows of their fingers stirring
above nuclear buttons. The same cold-heartedness
as Genghis, Vlad, Stalin or Hitler; the will
to wipe out, not armies, but children at their meals,
at school, in hospital wards, babies
who have still to recognize themselves.
Their lies as nature withers; our children's
futures left arid by their glory-seeking;
this civilisation in straight reverse.
We brutalise with greater ease, level homes by the city,
kill innocents in soaring numbers;
the 21st century, and, incapable of learning,
we have given these vainglorious men the care of our billions.
(a rewrite of a poem from 2022)
Droplets
along the sharp edge of a stone
like a chain of headlights
in December traffic,
sidling onto moss greenery,
streaming down an algal thread
to a pool of pellucid water
over a mosaic of coloured stones.
Beads of water, taxis,
carrying you in iotas
to pools, your thoughts
in subterranean caverns
where the beauties are pin-sized
and, though forgotten,
were once your fireworks.
on asphalt, concrete,
glass and slate;
drumming steel, aluminium
wood, copper, tin;
slapping tarpaulin and canvas,
polyester and polythene;
raindrops, billions,
thunderously:
a summer downpour
slowing now
slowing
fingers,
fingers tapping
buckets, barrels,
blocks, boxes, bricks,
hollows in canopies,
puddles, ponds and pools;
flicking leaves,
chattering light
as the sun finds crevices in the jet sky
tipping
tapping
now below the frequency of seconds,
dream-like,
to isolated beats,
the new world of
water-lensed
colours teeming thunderously,
giddily,
answering sound
with a symphony of light.
Distance
A train tunnelling through the night-time lights briefly
before the sound, self-weaving,
eventually becomes another thread in the wind.
From over the fields, a dog barks; perhaps a fox
stirring the undergrowth, a flurry of wings in a coop;
the commotion broadcast along the chicken wire.
A bird is calling from the unknown of vanished daytime;
a child listens; a key turns;
another vastness opens in the sweeping of invisble wings.
