Age

What is the age of a moth,
fluttering in darkness
and counting days in eddies
of light?
A spoonful makes the measure
of life.

The mosquito counts years
in hours,
egg-obsessed,
seizing the day.

The sloth, though,
is born old,
time trickles through its fancies
like water through rock,
feeding secret caverns
of thought.

Trees slow-grown rings
beat time like an ancient clock,
sounding the rhythm of years,
the girth of their growth
gathering the substance of summer.

My growth
is harder to measure,
an invisible garnering of wisdom
and spirit
that can light time,
allowing the turn of the earth
to furnish a rhythm
of fading leaves, stiffening boughs

and fruit.

© Jane Upchurch

Secret Knowledge

Some talk of the man with a limp and a cough whose shot rang
out from the long-grassed hillock;
of gangstas who drive with no headlights

wasting flashers who they pass in the night;
and wasn't there once a widespread belief,
foretold by Nostrodamus, that temporal thief,
that some sects kill babies every solar eclipse
kissing each other with blood on their lips?
But insights of others can be more esoteric:
of mayhem that swells, chaotic, horrific,
behind souls rushing all at once up to heaven,
saved merely by knowledge of the numeral seven;
of celtic islands where elfin forces
make diamonds and gold from magical sources.
Then there's the man who somehow survives
with his head in a vat and who thinks he's alive
and a secret cabal in control of the rain,
and tell me please, can someone explain
those sightings of Belfast's lost liner
and why no one will talk of the thirty fourth miner?

These are the truths avowed by the few:
if they prove false then the old is the new
and may dragons awake from where they were hurled
and let me fall over the edge of the world.

Peter Keeble

A Different Game

A Different Game

It's Scrabble our late Sunday evening game
but soon it's clear that something is amiss.
She's focused but her playing's not the same.
A four for SAD? She's never played like this.
Unconsciously, she's choosing words not score
we realise, and every tile she lays
in PAIN and SUFFER is one dry tear more.
Another wasted S in LOSS. She plays
out, and in one sense never playing better,
her grief. I test my theory with RAVE
and, sure enough, she uses her blank letter
as a G and turns it into GRAVE
with downwards GONE.
And then the still unshed.
She's lost the game
and weeps a dry-eyed DEAD.

Dorothy Pope

Two For Joy

Oh Look! Three magpies on the lawn!
but now just two, for one has gone.
my thanks go to the thoughtful third,
a generous and gracious bird
which realised it was de trop
and understood it had to go.
it counted round, then off it flew
to leave the magic number two.
i wonder what the joy will be
the birds have kindly brought for me.
No boy or girl, i'm past the age
when children featured, centre stage.
i'd like- it's sweeter far than honey,
a plentiful supply of money.

John Waddell

Small Hope

We walked Small Hope
step by paddled step
skirmishing with seaweed ribbons.
A necktie of laced shoes
lovingly kiss at my nape.
Feet scuff sea
as it sand-ices with froth.
We say nothing,
still fresh stars break silence
from their moorings
to light our steps.
Heads lift briefly, but no sound.
I steal your views a comment
yet our distance stays dumb.
Walking on,
the tides wash carpet
pulls back, to spare us and Moses.
Then biblical fanfares rise
and all manner of your friends
descend on us,
dabbing their aerial feet
into the ready-mix of
old sand castles
and BC life,
till you fly.

Jerry Pike