In Praise Of Slow

Daydreamers know they only seem
to spin the world who rush and steam-
roller the money making scheme
with workaholic self esteem.

In hammock hung from apple bough
ideas come, it's not known how.
Inventors, poets all avow
the idling minds the one endowed.

with thought. The Newton's, Wordsworth's know
the fruitfulness of going slow,
of gazing, musing, strolling so
let's pause awhile and wiser go.

Dorothy Pope

Of Sentimental Value

Just a knife
she said
seeing only
the vulgar plastic of its blue handle
its slim serrated blade.

Not seeing
our first sunlit
together day
under your Italian sky
with bread and cheese
autumnal peaches
warm red wine
wine and peaches glowing
with the salty sweetness
of ur new love,
shopping in Standa
for a knife
to fashion our future.

Just a knife;
but now a symbol
of when out lives
were intertwined
and your smoke swirled
around our youth
fragrant with coffee
icing sugar sweet
like paastries from Motta,
our certainty
lapped with
olive oil and sun.

Now I slice onions
with our knife
under chillier skies.

Sylvia Goodman

Grub Up

Getting up at three,
I put my shoes on the bed
left a hot tap running
and toothpaste top off,
didn't flush the loo
or replace toilet paper.
Walking downstairs
I floored some rubbish
left the fridge door wide open,
food wrappers everywhere,
and milk on table.
Old dirty plates whispered their pattern
through dried tomato sauce.
I balanced some waste
on an open, overflowing bin,
then wandered out to sit
amongst the two foot grass stems
in the rotting deckchair,
surrounded by wilderness roses,
and multi-coloured pegs
discarded from the line.
I chucked my filthy clothes near
the washing machine
borrowed some money I'd never return
and later, got a lift a few miles
at midnight…
then suddenly
like a whirlwind of remembrance
I looked in the grubby mirror
and realised I was no longer
a teenager.

Jerry Pike

Minerve

The ghosts of heretics
have gathered tonight
down in the gulley
outside Minerve.
Among them, the Perfect
relive the siege
and how the crusaders
destroyed their one well
then burned them alive
down in the gulley
outside Minerve.
They see once again
Simon de Montefort
that black-hearted monster
deploying one-eyed religion
to get what he thought he deserved
by killing the Perfect of Minerve.

Now visitors wander about
curious to find the site of the pyres,
then go into the caves
and build stone cairns
to remember the victims of the fires.
It is there the truly devout may pray
that the bishops and barons
are safely contained in their own hells
for what they once did
to the perfectly good
who preferred to be left
perfectly dead,
but true to their word,
down in the gulley
outside Minerve.


140 Parfaits (priests of the Albigensian or Cathar religion) were burned alive by Catholic forces after the siege of Minerve in south west France in 1210, part of an internal crusade against supposed heretics.

Peter Keeble