Hard Frost

A night frost following an early spring
has blighted the magnolia. Now browned,
its petals droop and fall, littering
like yesterday's confetti on the ground.

Where is its glory now, perfection's blush
that stopped me as I walked to gaze and gaze?
That just one silent stroke could do so much
by stealth to spoil its subsequential days!

The man who walks his dog said, "Never mind.
There's always next year to look forward to,"
but what, of course, he could not understand
was that to me the lovely tree was you.

You, darling, cannot bloom in future years.
Your petals a finality - my tears.

Dorothy Pope

Coming Home

A piano plays,
warming the edge of thought.

Fuller than a radio, the music carries
the sense of skin pressing each note,
the sense of blood beating each beat,
an embodied song.

This is how you come home,
how you reclaim your space
in our lives.

The piano stops but the music stays,
warming the waiting air.

©Jane Upchurch
www.janeupchurch.co.uk

Answers On A Postcard

It was near the end of the world,
as I remember,
her sunset flecks written
over speedboat trails
before it was dragged across
the vacant, slurried beach.
She sent me here,
some journey back,
that pastel artist,
straggling up Porth Dinllaen's
rising slipway
under-arm sketches
in turquoise, mauve and black,
kindling mad and moody.
Unknown ships,
we jammed into chat,
on some delirious
boy's canvas.
No Inns, but a suggested out,
I should have caught.
The North-West jaunt, now
had soft beer for spirit,
and a Leica for eyes,
with the end closer than before,
as Aberdaron seawall, mosaiced
to a tomb stone collage
tilting the graveyard for
their nearing slide
splash-less
into the sea-deep.

Jerry Pike

Let's Get Lost....For Chet Baker, Jazz Man

Again the ceiling thumped, through black
and whitened flickers of the old,
as step by step, each muted track,
hummed from his lips, to heavens gold

A coil of brass let loose and long.
He played this funny Valentine.
steeped up in drugs, too higher song
that felled so many from their climb.

Those books of substance wrote his dues,
and planes touched down, but barely him
three countries banned him from their news,
but Paris heroed, pretty slim.

Deep down inside Le Chat Qui Pêche
the devils heat cooked up a gas
He never knew which chord to wish,
but hell he’d hypnotised the mass,

The beat set, and its women drooled,
he built them stairways out of smoke
and walking down, each woman fooled,
on green, green grass of home (and coke).

Alfa Romeo, made his day,
unlike in broken sixty-eight,
when caught they knocked his teeth away.
#six months before he proper ate.

Khaki fatigues, pyjama stripes,
accounts from prison, laid no sin.
Outside his own career he swipes
at any way to get back in.

Then loads of Secanol delayed,
he crossed the age of fifty-eight,
and balconies just watched him fade,
out of that Paris jazz debate.

I’m deep in dream for you he’d say,
come let’s get lost, inside my head,
and slicked brown hair, brushed all away
now Dizzy, Miles and Bird are dead.

but when Chet blew, his notes curled up
in smokey blue where moonbeams hide.
And when he sang, all hearts stood still,
the ceiling thumped,
and angels cried.

Jerry Pike

For jazz trumpeter and singer, Chet Baker.

Blue

The sky is blue today,
an ocean of it stretching
above my head,
fathoms high
and inscrutable.

It has collected
all the yellows and reds,
holding their light tight
so I can’t see it

like your face
when you hide your heart.


© Jane Upchurch

In Your Shoes

In your shoes i'd have wondered what i'm like,
as woman now, and how I was at school.
did you not ever ask yourself, awake
at night perhaps, if i was beautiful
or clever, happy,mother now to boys
who looked like you, as handsome,tall and blond,
or if, for want of funds and fathering, all joys
had come to nothing, not survived beyond
the day you left us, broke? Life was deprived,
of course, but you gave me a legacy
I prize. you l3eft me hypersensitised
to cruelty and worth - rare gift. I see
right through facades. Not spared a second thought,
i'm fine - though i'm the dasughter you forgot.

Dorothy Pope