The World's Gone Out

It stole my moleskin trilby
grabbed a beige Mack
by the door
and scooted.
Leaving my dwelling
on the good times
of fourteen across,
pencilled in
and near completion.

I sketched missing links on paper
got out of my brain
slid to the floor
and wandered about,
seeing things as they were
prodding past experiences
into life, and quizzing them
from my new freer perspective.

The world raced on,
and no one to stop me
I chased after it
sneaked through a window
and gazed back blurred
at a congealing mist
that crossed my essence,
as I ran moonward

Dancing unhindered, empty as air
I smiled at the nothing
I’d become.
Joking and talking to people
who couldn’t see me,
I bumped into
another nobody
we hugged
the world stood still
and doffed my hat.

Jerry Pike

Community

It is late autumn after all.
the land half dead:
light enough to dig by,
not to find nails in a shed.
So the skies are filled,
brimming with clouds scudding along
beneath a grey gauze background.
Gates and the like
thrash the pitiable trees
steal their last red and yellow coins,
dash them to the ground.
Suddenly a lone bird
beats across the sky;
buffeted sideways,
it recovers, continues.
Hard to know its purpose:
whether searching out food,
or leaving or returning,
is impossible to guess.

For no clear reason,
next day, two trees are full of these birds.
Their pin pricks of noise
swarm in a white racket
with no pattern to our ears.
They gather in order to leave.
On the edges the anxious twitch and jerk
start up into the air,
see their mistake,
flap back down,
wait for the one true message.
They all know when it comes,
all surge up,
circle and wheel
like a stream of black rags
bisecting the air
until, again, instinct or signal
impels them hurtling out of sight.
We should expect no less.


Peter Keeble

Daisy Chain

Daisy Chain

On such an afternoon as this, I sat
in summer grass and made a daisy chain,
my first, aged four, all eagerness, once taught,
to link the little flowers. I see again
that meadow somewhere deep in Warwickshire,
my mother with her dreamy hazel eyes,
contented, sitting separate but near,
I concentrating on my enterprise.
And when she judged it long enough, she did
the tricky job of joining end to end,
then placed it, coronet, upon my head
and with her Brownie box preserved me, crowned.
Unbidden, half forgotten, these thoughts rise
of mother, daisies, learning, childhood skies.

Dorothy Pope