A Child At A Window

Still gathering and editing from the last six years of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap. The years of Covid has given me a lot of drafts of poems to consider. This is a simple enough poem; those Sunday afternoon matinees on the tv opened my childhood mind up to a universe of imagination, they embedded and have fed my efforts at poetry right up to my present.

A Child At A Window

It’s nighttime, the sky’s my screen. Laurence Olivier is fleeing

through a forest, dark fronds clutching, clawing at him;

a gothic tale full of the drama of black and white.

The forest is vast and he must run blindly through it,

somewhere behind is the story I haven’t seen, and

somewhere ahead is a border with a land no one knows.

I am at my window, the land I know is quenched;

above, across the inexplicable expanse of the Heavens, is adventure;

I watch it, take it to my bed, knowing tomorrow colour will return.

On that Beach

 

Flood of  sunlight.

Alone on that beach,

dozing to the clock of the tide:

sibilance into sonorousness:

each wave rolling down the coast.

You walked along the water’s edge,

white cotton dress, fishing net for the sun;

beautiful.

.

When today I hear a tide’s clamour

each wave’s commotion roaring into the distance;

consider the millions of stones turning over,

the endlessness of that beauty strikes

the match of that momentary vision:

you dressed in light,

strolling the edge of eternity

just once

as the tide drummed an afternoon’s hours away.

Emigration

 

Emigration

She went on a liner; we waved and waved and cried.

The ship’s horn blasted out its great bulky voice

and moved away from the quay. We watched her face

till it was indistinct, her frame till it was indistinct,

the throng of passengers hanging over the rail till they

were indistinct, the ship diminished in size slowly, slowly,

till  it was a dot on the horizon and then it was gone.

I looked out over the great sadness that is the ocean,

it was lapping inside me; this was not such a death

for her with the warming promise of her future,

but for us watching it was like a birth rescinded.

Untitled for now

 

Here is the first part of a poem that I can extend in a number of ways. So, for an early 2026 project, this is the decline of a living room that I used to know.

Cushions flattened, upholstry thinned,

chair legs cracked and broke.

The piano grew old, gap-toothed, jangly;

soon its notes refused to sound.

Upholstery ripped, horsehair came through;

floorboards creaked; curtains hung

like jackets on hooks.

Grime-covered windows greened,

the weather stole in;

a board placed in the gap

but weather, like bees, found another way.

The floorboards warped, rotted;

one day an ivy shoot poked a pair of leaves.

through a crack in the window frames.

I remember green-tinted glass vases,

photographs of yankee cousins

and space that the fire could hardly heat.

And though there was light; I remember

the faces dim like fish in a river;

and the growing resonance of voices

in that emptying room.