Like My Daughter Says

If, like my daughter says,
you are now a million particles
orbiting in space,
may you keep on spinning.
Or else as I look out tonight,
I hope you fall like snow
and settle for a while.

Neil Elder

Louisa Bay Café

The blues merge

lose character

as faint-light tinsels

deep as damn 

into dusk-pools.

Day players,

fold salt-wet life back

inside striped canvas bags.

Parading gulls sulk,

their luminous screeches

jump out, brightly voiced

from nightfall's dirge.

A black and orange tug,

wakes by, checking,

dead shore

for the lifeless

and not so.

Sailboarders scoop

a sandpit fireplace,

slotting beach scrap

between tinder flames,

their barbecue group

enthused and vibrant,

patch a pirate's living,

to the fabric they hang on.

Two women's shell-likes,

eavesdrop the seaweed edge,

hearing distant cinema songs,

where the wrecks used to be.

They glaze over, unnoticed,

and the snack bar

crumples into nothing.

Jerry Pike

Betrayal

With your reassuring hum
I never thought you could be
arsonist or assassin.

You kept my food safe,
my drinks cool,
were a familiar friend.

It was only when I heard
how others like you
had caused fire and death

that I came to study you.
You continued humming
but I was no longer fooled.

A man came round
to change the condenser.
No short-circuit now!

We’re friends again.
I’ve almost forgotten
how nearly you killed me.

Jennifer Johnson

Published in Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window edited by Ruth O’Callaghan

Seasons

The procession of our seasons
carries us forward afresh, and
transfigures the dark and the grief.

The unfurling leaves of our spring
encode our own sure transience
in the cycle of creation.

The confidence of summer’s growth
allows a myth of permanence,
fuelling the cycles of our love.

Burnished, we prepare to transmute
this our flourishing, to free us
for the cycle of earth’s renewing.

For the seeming deaths in winter
are truly the transfigured lives -
resilient, transcendent, and ineffable

© Anthony Pinching

Coining It

A late March, along the pier
they group, too thin for weather,
all mod cons in gangs of old,
rubbing coppers the wrong way,
as static gambling drags their
carefree souls to sea level.
It slots you in, greases your palm
with spurious dollars,
a brief windfall energised by salt air
and your head screens guilt trailers.
You dig deep, finding the angry money,
you flick it dangerously with a backward spin.
The penny drops,
the penny pushes
and grips your small dreams tightly,
beside a teenage thump.

Jerry Pike

Fern Hill (After Dylan Thomas)

As I was young and uneasy far from the apple boughs,
About the silent house, unhappyas the streets were grey,
The sun above me cold and flat,
Life held me tight and sighing
Caught in the turmoil of my time,
And forgotten among commuters
I was lost in the timeless town
So when I sank to sleep
the farm peopled my dreams
Faded from colour to white
Down the rivers of the windfall night.
 And as I was dark and burdened,
alone among the stars,
Sitting in the school and listening
as the farm was born
In the poem that was young once more,
Time let me stretch and be
Golden in the mercy of his words,
And new and golden
I was loved and farmer, the fields
Rang to my touch,
the sunlight on the hills
shone clear and bold
And the spirit sang, glowing
In the ripples of the flowing streams.
All the day long it was humming,
it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as my home,
the sound of the swallow, it was free
And flying, food and water
And green as flame.
The sungrew round that very day.
Nothing I cared, in my sky blue daze,
that soil and mortar
In their dust and drying
and the cobwebs of dying things
Clung to the soles of my feet
Fir I sang in my chains like the sea.

 Jane Upchurch

DESPAIR

I used to think I knew the ways of verse,
and that I kissed its purposes and methods:
to amuse and entertain,
to admire, educate, describe and politicise,
to transform and to sustain
sometimes with just a simple list.
Then I read Terrier in rape
and despaired at my ignorance
and at how it gave no explanations
but held that mass of yellow smells
up to the dog within us all,
how seen from above by bees
it's only an atom's track immersed
within the yellow rape:
and how all this just is,
like the very universe.

Peter Keeble

The World's Gone Out

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

Those Feet (With apologies to William Blake)

And did those feet, a lovely thought,
tread England's grasses sandal-shod
or is this mere idea, caught
in wishful thinking's web? He's trod

the walkways of the mind of man
world-wide for centuries and so
to want him here in Avalon
is natural but can we know?

The facts add up and there are years
of His life unaccounted for.
A thorn tree for his crown of tears
is rooted on this English shore.

The rational remain aloof.
"It's possible," our minds admit,
"though only that for lack of proof,"
Yet instinct clamours, "I know it."

Dorothy Pope