Skilled Worker

He spends his days peering
into charmless caverns
shining lamps into damp spaces.
Some may emanate sweetness
others odours redolent of decay
neglected tombs of joyful times.
Ranged in the wet warm darkness
rear up the standing rocks
deep-rooted white in rose-hued beds.
Some crags discoloured
cracked and fissured
teeter in amatanthine gloom.
His silvery instruments
flash and glint reflecting
movement of his twisting wrist.
He probes the noisome depths
casts jets of water, blasts of air.
An adamantine surface
pierced, a bridge in place,
a brace applied. He toils
unchallenged among cavities.
His wordless victim lies
supine and tense, fists clenched
the whole world contracted
to a white coat, a whining drill.

Sylvia Goodman

Holiday

The sun is a bowl
holding heat on my skin
like love,
soaking into my bones,
into my mood
like balm.

My knots unravel,
my pressures melt away.

I am butter, oozing.
I am apple pie,
peeled and baked and brown.

I have brought all of me
on holiday,
my toes, my tears, my ears,
the whole package
so we can each unwind.

This is meditation,
my mind not chasing plans,
past and future folded away,
just the glorious, sun-filled
present.


©Jane Upchurch
www.janeupchurch.co.uk

Wash My Sins Away

I'd warned her many times
one item, full wash, full spin
noise alone should have
been enough,
but now, banging for drum heaven
the machine's ghost itself departed.

Just Sunday left,
and from my wet window,
today's future looked stormy.
So I loaded the bath,
soap powder, hot water, and
a week's clothes,
hand-washed all, then tried to
wash the soap out, bugger.

As light bulbs go
this idea shone semi-dim
in a stupid kind of way
that had feasibility.
So Your Honour,
I was pegging out clothes
drenched through
in the height of a rain storm,
to rinse them, yes, rinse them.
when she came home
and said the wrong thing.

Jerry Pike

Homecoming

For years I've dreamed of coming home
to Cornwall, place where I was born.
Nowhere, I am both overcome
and quite at peace. those things foresworn
to live in cities, beautiful and wild,
delight and slot back into place
to that self I was as a child.
I know this sand, wind on my face,
the turquoise and the pewter moods
of this west country sea. Red earth alludes
to patchwork fields of memory.
Dear God, what fate caused me to stray?
Now here, how can I go away?

Dorothy Pope