Life Begins At Eighty

Yes, life begins at eighty. It is true.
You get excused all kinds of nasty chores
like washing dishes. As for gardening you
just say you're far too frail, must stay indoors.

You do feel up to telly food and games,
describing how life was between the wars.
Pretending to be deaf or daft are claims
which never tall to silence crashing bores.

Come lunch-time, you can log it to the table
then aver that indigestion gives you pause.
A large postprandial brandy gets you stable
before the most uninhibited of snores.

At half past three, you rouse for tea. You've found
that exercise is best kept to the jaws.
At eighty you're so proud to be around,
you think you're due a big round of applause.

Dorothy Pope

A Winter Birth

Feeble foal spilled into frosty morning
Patient mare melts icicles m they form
Strangely the stables had no warning.
White tipped grass and glinting frost
Sun shines fierce from its blue awning.
Grey church tower lit with ice
Black trees powerless against its burning.
Mare unsurprised, quiet and calm
Foal twists his neck to see her, yearning
For the warm cocoon lost in his borning
As hunger strikes, shaky legs grow firm
With milk he feels his first strength churning.
The mare accepts, then walks on ahead
Unmoved, resigned to a new life's dawning.

Sylvia Goodman

My Blue Car

My blue car
broke down on every cue,
still I loved it.
Then the day of its sale
something strange happened
I burst into tears.
I liked it, but not that much.
Then it struck, four years
I’d owned it and the
three biggest loving influences
of my life, had passed away.
I couldn’t reverse down that motorway,
open a door and let them back in,
they were all now fixed
in the rear view mirror.

Three sudden goodbyes
via casual nod.
All gone in six months.

The church of uproar
sang with hundreds
all three sat high in near by pews
still to print out their vacant spaces
in my stamp book life.
I heard no bell ring
but angel’s wings whispered past.

We four still talk, or I do to them
much inside my new blue car.
So happy memories move on,
new owners, well…
one’s a hundred miles north
with three others
hitching the unmapped road
that careers through heaven.

Jerry Pike

Greeting Or Meeting

Walking down the street
through quiet air
and happening to meet
a neighbour
(when younger I shied
from the formality
of greeting)
we threw each other
a ‘good morning’
and a smile
(the phrases used
seemed conventions
without meaning)
and carried on our way
with contentment.

I didn’t realise back then
that simple words
could act as bowls
to carry blessings.
‘Isn’t the weather awful’
wasn’t an invitation
to complain
about the rain,
but to join in human
solidarity,
to share an experience,
to let another in,
to wrap an arm around
in greeting.

Jane Upchurch
www.janeupchurch.co.uk

The Wooden Universe

This world is like the rest.
The trees with unseen gnarled branches
have elbowed out all rivals
or smothered them under vast blankets of green.
As we skim the leaf tops
there is nothing but this swaying sea of foliage.

Look at it again, for there is nothing else to see:
we must begin to wonder why we came so far,
hurtling through the dark,
if every destination is the same:
green leaves staring blindly up at their star.
If this is all there is and this is all that trees can do
they might as well be dead.
Even the music we play to stay sane,
strumming guitars or a single clear alto,
cannot lend this arid horde the least spark of panache.
Unfeeling, unthinking, unblinking,
they just go on at being green
for as long as they are seen.

How we crave some variety:
a clearing with a dwelling,
a column of smoke,
sign of some small flash of thought:
but there is only the living desert,
this self-replicating verdant virus
that chokes all planets that we visit.

And now one thought has grown into my green hell:
that like these pointless swaying trees
we are lucky accidents,
dull cellular machines,
who fool ourselves that we possess
some restless magnificence,
some meaning, beyond a tree or leaf,
or our blurred dream of green.

Peter Keeble