And so I will grow roses
And enthuse everyone with Jasmine, having sharpened
Everything with lemons.
Let children chew pawns
From my fresh chess set,
While I eat geranium
Chocolate with orange.
Garden, house and food –
May I never forget these blessings
And always look up
From my table with thanks.
Room for me
Room for you
Room for all
Hearth, heart
And space to
Breath, to stretch
To love to
Eat to seed
To sound to
Cry unbound,
To crave, to crash
And reassemble
In the factory that
Makes each
Day new for
Each and every
One.
A person and a penguin , in conversation
Person:
‘Accessories are what it’s all about –
Hats, scarves, bangles worn over gloves,
Keeping warm in the snow, nothing
Else counts when you’re cold and wet too –
Suddenly life contracts to a quick pulse
In the chest, trying to beat Frost and reach
Hands and feet first.
Penguin:
Keep the shuffle going, to and fro,
Across the glacier, here
And there a slide and skate
Punctuated with the odd skid
And backwards swirl, churning
The blood through warm wings or,
As we call them, waistcoat fins.
Person:
‘Where are we going in all
This white, what paths shall
We black when all previous
Tracks are under four metres of
Soft silence and the only clues
are foxing paths deviating on
a scent we’ll never crack?
Penguin:
Why ask where we are going?
There is no direction
To go in because we are
Home, our feet make it
Newly, every step
into top snow .
Person:
‘Don’t you ever ponder,
One day, ice gone,
you’ll be swimming Through
to Death or simply,
wait for Life to
Pass, from the last
Raft of rock?
Penguin:
‘And what does it matter?
I feel my egg between our
Feet and know to protect
And honour –
Our pact – we three:
Her, egg and me.’
Another conversation, same person, same penguin
Person:
What use is breeding? One
More penguin when there
Are thousands
Picking fights to
Get to the inside.’
Penguin:
Who are you to ask why?
You have over engineered
Your brain so that
No fuel is compatible and it
Eats itself for food.’
Person:
‘Still, must be more to Life than
Eggs that may
Never survive and hatched,
What will it do? Make more
Eggs like you?
Penguin:
Better that than
Unhappy with what
I have, thirsty for what
I haven’t need, hungry
For what I’ve just gorged on.
The ice is melting
And we’re all on it –
Melting it more
In the warmth of shared space – nothing
More, nothing less.
Reality abides with us,
Quietly, no fuss at the fading snow.
Sitting cold next to Arthur,
Tea brewing strongly.
Tied the knot in 1952, now
Tightened too flat to tell knot
From rope, you pop out to shops,
You pop back to tea, he pops
Upstairs to find his crossword. You pop
Out again for more tea from Maggie’s cups –
Same bags but the milk’s not
Not gold topped. Still, there are plenty of biscuits
Arthur couldn’t eat.
Take a tube node
in a nude robe,
make a rail stack
in a base rack,
sing a game toad
through a jail song,
breach a round fist
with a top hat.
Play a safe card
on a dud horse,
race a small car
down a kind alley,
case a large joint
with a ham held
to a stock pot of
cruelling liquorish rum.
Wish a roast catch
from a soft patch
taken to far, time
backed when cradle
scratched the timber
drawn silver in the
dust of crime hatched
warm in the sabre’s den.
Clam a tenth hole
with a skin flack
near a petal pen
written soft on a clothes
vine to make it
read cool through the
breeze of toasting wine.
Leave a mean coin fifty for
a pint of frozen, delivered
promptly at the smack of
dawn to the raw step cold
of the door, ready to wield
the whinge and make people
within soft with calf-juice,
woken up from this dream.
On Life stood a long day
Set up coolly
With meditation
And loud water
Gushing through
Fingers into basin
The house was built in 1864 or thereabouts
With bricks and mortar
In the usual way,
Set down on the street
‘Tween two just the
Same.
No, I lie. Next
Door was a shop,
Greyed out now, modern
Style, frosted windows, the works.
Behind doors to the house of
A family, bent by
Chance into odd-
Shaped rooms, tombs
For the spirits of eras
Passed, mingling now and
Then with the plates on
The rack or a glass in the
Cupboard, no harm meant.
After twenty five years
No surprise at a flying saucepan.
A family lived in the house,
Part of it, kin to it,
Whatever its freight.
Besides, after twenty five years, they
Had their own ghosts as guests,
Those former selves in former
Times living on,
Resonating in overlapping lines.
The cello practice, the barking
Dog, the sleeping dog,
The trampoline, the one that
Broke, the roller blades,
The skipping rope.
The time when budgies tweeted
In the kitchen
And Ma cooked at 6 for me
And 8 for him, again.
The time when garden’s shade
Was less and next door neighbour
Had a cat called…called….
Times gone but still present
In the ether, round the stairs, up the blocked chimney,
Or the skylight, then
Down, over mossy steps
And at the back door, again,
With a ratataptap, like a
Ghost..
No, it must be Jack
The new next door neighbour’s
Cat.
Published in Balladof Magazine, October 2009
Being Every Day 