poetry diary

You could have leapt the other way 
and missed the drop into the mud.
You could have lived another day
and chewed the cud.

You knew this then and as you fell
you turned your face towards the sun
and called forlorn, too weak to tell
your mate to come.

You could have weaned another calf;
you could have seen another flood; 
you could have heard the jackals laugh; 
you might have loved. 

Instead through eighty million years
you call for all who could have leapt
and might have loved, but faced their fears
too late, and wept. 

—————

I’m in North Yorkshire, finding fossils near Whitby.

Purposeful people with singular strides
condensing from crowds; all droplets of life.
For what is each searching, and where do they go?
So much I must ask them, so many to know.

——————————-

On the concourse at Marylebone Station in London this afternoon.

A man, like a ship on an endless sea,
I am, and I watch where the mermaids go;
searching and yearning for a place to be.

Far from a harbour with nowhere to flee,
baggage overboard and few stores below;
a man, like a ship on an endless sea.

If only I’d listened when they spoke to me,
and not, like a boy, played the toy hero,
searching and yearning for a place to be.

I held to illusions, safe beside the quay;
too eager to please, and to wait for the flow:
no man, no ship, and not out at sea.

And now I’ve set sail, but the ship’s in the lee;
It’s hard and it hurts, as I’ll first have to row:
searching and yearning for a place to be.

This world is wide, and her best is free.
I’m glad that at last, at the end I know;
I’m a man, like a ship on an endless sea,
searching and yearning for a place to be.

——————-

This is a villanelle – my first attempt at this form, which I have been feeling like trying for a week or two. I like the gentle rhythm the pattern imposes on the poem, like waves and the sea (although apparently villanelle is an Italian sixteenth century pastoral style of poetry). It’s also fun to try proper rhyming structures occasionally!

Submitted to Poets United.

Amongst the scents of watching summer:
sweet lilies and petunias,
cracked eggshells and tiring grass;
the fallen swift lay alone,
lost and empty.

“Fill me! Fill me!” his fledgling’s cry,
and age-lined leaves rustled in reply:
“Look up, look up – recall the joys
of air and sky you felt just once
(before you hit the ground)”

He looked, and called, and looked again.
The leaves watched till it grew dark,
and in the morning, he was gone.

I woke today to see through different eyes,
raindrops on leaves, sunlight through trees, those pears.
I stood taller, too, rising from my car;
more in this world, more free, more clear, more new.
So much I’ve missed, so much to see and share
to learn and grow, to find and to explore.
Perhaps more able, too, to love and live,
to write and feel, to touch and care what’s real.
Both joy and pain, I know, beyond control;
and always time – ahead, behind and now.
All this and more I owe, simply, to you.
Thank you, once more, for teaching me to be.

Raindrops on leaves in my garden

——————-

Trying to capture the beauty of the raindrops on these leaves this morning brought home to me how difficult it is to take good photographs.

Confounding expectations, a ball of
spikes surprised by sprays of sapphire stars:
from hostility to hospitality and hope;
inviting you and me to see and feel
the wholeness and individuality
of each petal and stem, and all against
dark deep blue within and underneath
– out of reach.

There is a world within this sphere;
a world of caution yet display;
of inner and outer shells and days;
the promise of joy in place of thorns,
and of beauty in unexpected places,
– rising with the sun.

May we all, like this flower, find our bees.

——————–

Echinops is a globe thistle, and one of the more surprising and beautiful flowers in my garden, I think. I cut some for the first time this year, and they are wonderful – to share too. My poem doesn’t do them justice, but I wanted to try.