THE WELLS OF WHENCE

ENLIGHT

ASH-SHE - on the felling of the Beloved Ash

They came without fanfare
As Autumn gathered her gold
In keys and coppery carillons
Of trees untold.

You stood, Beloved Ash,
Fraxinus fair,
Facing unfazed their saw teeth
Till no tree was there.

When stillness swallowed blade-hum
In your shadowy wake,
The sawdust sprinkled silence
For your soundless sake.

This space still throws your shape
Above your severed root.
The elder that you sheltered
Conjures sap and shoot

In memory of your majesty,
Spring sprays unborn.
Birds circle your absence,
Wings on paths well worn.

Your stump now melts its heart
In toadstool and in moss,
Minting from Winter's promise
Wisdom, truth and loss.

[Tribute to the much-beloved Ash tree (Fraxinus excelsior) at the end of my garden, felled earlier this month at the request of another who lived in its sacred shadow but saw only leaf litter and blocked sky. Felt its going so deeply, it's taken me this long to say what I wanted to say in tribute to such a beautiful old friend. I could never do it full justice. RIP the Beloved Ash.]

GALAXY (or "Middle-aged contemplative Luddite gets her very first smartphone")

You snuggle in my palm
Smug in textured armour
Rippling with rhythms of cyber-synapse

I dodge your curt commands
Stacked distractions
Hide you under some foxed paperback

We sim, we circle,
Learning one another's biometrics
Agog, aghast for updates

BUTTERFLY WITH BONES - a poem for those who live with chronic illness

HEATWAVE

You are slanting like light

Across my memory

Colours undimmed

Turquoise and orange of photos

In an album shut since those Seventies summers

Detail gnawed thin by regrets we daren’t revisit.

Thermometer cannot rise to this,

Mercury shimmers, flat figures flickering.

That ladybird plague, the greenfly gorged on every stem

Pets crawling the paths, fur full of wings,

Seeking the refugee shade.

You are parching my tongue

With tears uncried

You are here, even now,

Luminous, crepuscular

You are sunfast.

WE BE CREATION'S CRYING

Bonded
To this body of birds
Wheeling in freeform flock

Rooted
Radical in earthball
Tendrils tucked
Through trackless undergrowth

Voice of the heartstop hare
From her barren form,
Whisper and whicker,
Melt and bloat

Ductile seductive
Plastic at the seabird's throat,
Barnacles losing purchase
On the toxic rock

We be creation's crying
Syrinx singing
Solidarity
With rhythmic sobs
Please cope

Struggling to shine afresh
The sun slinks up,
Wandering west
To wash the waste
Pale gold
Wanhope.

SEIZE THE MOMENT

I trust in cradling clouds of cicely

Its silken spilling, mirroring the stars,

I trust the hawthorn creaming into frothy

Along the margin of the sacred wood

I rest in hush, heady with damp silence,

In caverns where the cliff is mossed with life,

I rest in light where sky is stained with rainbow,

I trust, I rest in joy.

SILENCE

LAMB

Lamb in the seething heart

Of the nervy flock

Butted and nuzzled

Reddle-daub rainbows

On weather-damp wool

Circling soft

There the wall fallen

Opens on precipice

Bleats and barging

Lamb nudges hocks,

Tough mutton and tender

Hogget and mouflon

Upward she draws them

Stompers and sleepwalkers

Sheep of this pasture

Up the rock stairway

Of sunlight and silence

The lamb, she leads

GYROVAGUE

Fear lurks at my gate like a gyrovague,

Its begging bowl clogged with failure's bones,

Lisping its warning never to change,

Unstable as night mist's shifting tones.

It cries for alms in the dead of day,

It tolls the hours with cowled skull bowed,

Its habit frayed where the shame shows through,

Mulls over misstep and untrod road.

If I turn the key, it will knock and knock,

So I lend it a seat in my circle of bliss;

Having seen it hollow, I now sleep safe,

In the stillness of light where no dread is.

MISTER STARLING

Mister Starling soon bores

Of gasps and applause

From the rapt and ecstatic

At his feats aerobatic

So he has a few sessions

Of skits and impressions

Pretending to be

With a whistle or three

Other things he has heard,

Klaxon, car horn, Blackbird,

Mobile phone on vibrate

To impress his new mate.

In motley he dresses

Punky bad-hair-day tresses,

Sturnus vulgaris ought

Be called vulgar for short,

But without each wild antic,

Balletic and frantic

Roof and garden no doubt

Would be poorer without.

UNSUNG

I didn't rise for Matins

In anything but heart

Leaden limbs under the duvet

Tracing the restless

Leaf-lace on the nets

In bruise-bright ambulance blues

Hurtling through the oven of night

Pale ceiling fanned with someone

Else's tragedy

I held their panic up against

The small hours' looming

Wideness

Listening past the siren

Past the unsprung dawn

For unsung mystery and mercy

TELLING THE TEACHER

Standing by the nature table in your classroom,

Ruckled landscapes of gingham,

Jars of startled lemon trumpets,

Scent of binka and little accidents,

("Who's made a naughty smell?")

Squeak and slough of wax crayon,

Conkers in autumn

Pussy willow in spring.

Stroking fragility,

Sniffing the furry,

Twirling my tongue

One snowy playtime

To taste the fluster and fizz

Falling from forever.

That fossil hiding in the wall,

Ripples of secret aeons

Between the Infants' and Juniors'!

 Coaxed by your compendium of buds and birthing

My eyes, my heart stretched to take it all in,

The wonder of this world,

In music and motion.

We'd made it to the Moon,

Lived a whole decade in our skins

Made collages of how we might dress

In that thing called future,

Rubber-glueing chain mail of foil and button

On sugar paper, chubby fingers

Skipping in glitter,

Imagining.

We could never have dreamed,

We babes of the boom,

Your weekday words 

Whispering down all our tomorrows,

Rhythmic reminders

You are still somehow

Incurved nurture round our eggshell childhoods,

Tender to tease us out of ourselves,

Believing in us

Till we could

Believe in ourselves.

WHAT NOW?

Bell glows

Now. Now and now.

No emphasis or urgency.

Only the rift sliced through

The tolling

By the frisking wind.

What now?

This now,

Between breath

And silence.

Moss-lipped wince of boughs

Present beneath

This butterscotch light

Purring with sunfall.

WINGS FROM SILENCE

Leucistic Blackbird scuttleflusters 

Slantwise into hidey hedge

Wondering unhumble at its own

Soul-sweet difference

Sevenly splendid Ladybird

Beacons its unhidden

Abacus wings from silence

As suddenly as Spring

Both are beauty

Glory enfolds them both

DISSOLUTION (Roche Abbey, 1538) - a poem

Disbelieving

On hands and knees,

I crawl, shielding

The hum-bright hive,

Tilted honey spilling unspoiled

Bees trail a curling Kyrie

Up between linden’s fingers

Disbelieving that they would

Until they came

A storm of the king’s sending,

No pilgrimage of grace

Tripping me out of my habit

La belle Roche,

Melts into pewter, stone, timber, lead

What will become of me?

I lick my fingers

As the sword descends,

Taste only honey, blood,

Thyme from the shadows of the kitchen-garden.

Refectorium

Buzz and banter

Swims into silent

No stone unturned

Into rectangles of hollow

Mapped matins and misericord

Long since sung.

BLUE MONDAY

You for whom Monday dawns bluely

Not blue of gentian, of cirrus-combed skies,

Not cornflower, powder, periwinkle,

But bottomless blue bruise of ice,

Of frozen feather in a fox’s footprint:

I will stitch you a cloak of comfort in Arnolfini greens,

Swaddle your sadness in robes of amethyst,

Wrap your sorrow in sun-warmed apricots and ambers,

Dry your tears with tissues of cadmium and canary,

Warm your heart with carnelian and coquelicot reds.

I would not see you blue

But if that is where you must be for now,

I will walk out across

This fragile crust of slippy-sided blueness

To hold your hand

Under the frozen brow

To wait with you

For rainbows.