The Remaining

This poem has been with me for years. It seems like its content to have an enduring relationship with passing time. The image goes back to the eighties; have I finished with it? Only time can tell.

The Remaining.

See the watch-maker’s face bulge

disappear and bulge in clock glass;

his eyepiece transporting him back

to the innards of Victorian time;

their cogs acting his age; he cupping them,

tiny bones; nudging them onward

to tick his seconds away, and all the time

skeletons, back to his fathers’ reign,

lining the shelves like sunken galleons,

insensible the endless drift of the years.

Vision

The beach was a flood of  sunlight.

We, alone on that long stretch of strand, a dozed
to the clock of the tide marking afternoon time,

sibilance rolling into sonorousness with each wave’s passing.

I remember you walked along the water’s edge,

your white cotton dress a fishing net for the sun

and you were dazzling.

When today I hear a tide’s clamour resounding around a bay,

hear each wave’s commotion echoing into the distance,

and consider the millions of stones turning over,

the endlessness of that beauty strikes hard

against that momentary vision of you,
dressed in light,

playing on the edge of eternity
as the tide drummed an afternoon’s hours away.

Time to Celebrate

Passing time, whether ticking clocks, autumns or daffodils, has always been a rich ground for poets. The year passes on in a succession of natural displays: snowdrops under beech trees, cherry blossoms blown away in a matter of weeks, furze blazing again in the late spring sunshine.  The relentlessness of it all convinces me more and more that celebration is urgent and our time is now.  

In an Autumn Park

 

A maple is juggling a million splinters of sun,

its head lost within that globe of solar brilliance.

Sitting on an old wrought-iron bench

with my feet paddling in an pool of fallen leaves,

I stop a moment and listen to the sipping sounds of leaves

arriving dumbfounded onto the litter.

The ticking of years is not a regular beat:

a sudden gust of wind moves another year along.