BACK TO POETRY AGAIN

Having written poetry since the age of 7 or 8, I am getting back to it again after a 20 year break during which time I have been engaged professionally in watercolour painting and latterly in writing a book. I am posting firstly a poem I wrote in 1978 entitled "Open Spaces" about my then 6 year old youngest daughter, which received First Prize that year in the Bexley Arts Council Adult Literary Competition. The prize was £100 - not much by today's standard but wasn't too bad then. The remaining poems I wrote in the early eighties. So hopefully I will be writing some new ones soon.


OPEN SPACES

Walking over the wide-open spaces
my six year old daughter said
"I like holding your hand daddy,
it's all warm and squeezy"
and then
"I can always recognise people I know
by the anoraks they are wearing."

The far breeze was in our faces
tugging at our sleeves
sweeping and ruffling the grass,
and I wondered why in one breath
she had linked my hand and other peoples' anoraks.

Out there in the crying wind
which strained to join infinity unfurled,
the hard openness pressed through my heart -
the reality of those wide-open spaces
had not only dawned on me
but had squeezed my daughter's heart too,
the security of the anoraks and my hand
she had needed so much.

One small and young body had found freedom
to exist, to run, to fly.
Flight of a bird fresh from its nest,
but ready to return and nestle the twigs of home.

Far flung against the cotton galleons
I saw her, anorak silhouetted billowing in the breeze -
but soon, like a homing pidgeon she returned,
as though the world was too large
and should encircle her warm and squeezy like my hand.

HOLIDAY

Cutlass of sea cleanly scythed the pink horizon
No wonder it bled into the blue.
Perhaps it carried the stain of children's hearts
Bleeding freely on their last holiday night.
Perhaps this warm blood entered hearts too young to know
that sand and sea and long, long days
were not the reality their lives were to become
nor ours to remember.

The following morning it ended the red sea
The cold blue steely edge of sky
and cotton-brimming clouds
proclaimed a day so new
that all was forgotten of the pails of sun
that were emptied as castles of gold
onto historic sands.

Grey heads still searched for deck-chairs
in the corner of the sun
Children still chased crabs with their echoing cries.
The future was silent when we said:
"Only a week but a lifetime
of restless waters and drowning days."

THE BUTTERFLY

Against the sky
You flickered like shadows across our minds
The pleasure of your uprising
heightened our lasting pleasure in you.
Light glinted on your wings
as you swept from star to star;
You played long and melodiously
in the symphony of the grasses.

You found your way
by the light of the languishing boughs
Playing hide-and-seek through the sunbeams
and search-lights of the sun
Dodging the cannon-fire and shell-bursts
of seeds and burning leaves.

You paused as we watched breathless
then flew to the next flower
and all the world sighed at your going.

TO LIVE AGAIN

You heard the lark above the waking corn
and felt on the ear the lulling drone of insects
passing across the air, born by the breeze
The sounds and loves that yesterday held enduring
and carried forward searching the wind into the night.

You smelled the roses nodding on the fence
Holding forever their fragrance in the long summer days
And you have often sampled since
the same strange delight, passing swiftly
but savoured sadly while it lasted.

You lay on the cool shadowed grass
Searching for four-leaved clover elusive as treasure
Long-lost in the common multitude of grasses
Like the dawn of creation when the earth
was guilded for no purpose but for God
Until a man walked through the green lush pasture
And saw for the first time the great design
of beauty underneath the shadows.

The broad landscape is like heaven
Where the field's crazed network
sewed its celestial patchwork
Bluer at the edge and faded with the wear of years.

You are like the fields - green as grass
Your life is the patchwork and the blue is eternity
The grass dies only to live again
Born by the season's sorrow.

OLD SUBURBAN ROAD

Houses crouch and frown through the years
Hot wires radiate the telegraph may-pole
Red chimneys climb askance the sky's grey ladder
Pointing lonely, lost
The flurry of fingers, now smokeless
This funeral pyre a hundred snows long.

Inscrutable windows penetrate my heart unblinking;
Iron-grey stare deep as midnight
Holding hostage with menace their puerile occupants
Who unknowing to the lull of television
Relinquish their lives to the shout of darkness.
Some who escape the gloom
Chivy their squares of green and with owner-occupier stare
Lay their lives feet-upward on the turf
And morning-paper grey
They once sipped coffee till their heart-attack.

To walk a stream of concrete like this
Is to wade the town's sullen promise
As if my years clasped tight with packed rooves
Were not free to walk alone.