Feather bed

Give me a feather bed
to lounge the winter in
and a down duvet
to snuggle to my ear.

I hear the snow
will be deep this year
and the dark-eyed nights full of frost.

I will be at home
under wraps,
safe as a cygnet
swathed in swoons of swan down.

I will enjoy the snow
through the curtain, beyond the window,
muffling and hiding my home.

I will hear the rain
tinkling and tickling the trees,
the dark trees
beyond the pool of my light.

I have serious business to undertake,
in my folds, in my feather-nest,
dreaming the spring into being.



©Jane Upchurch

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

Community

It is late autumn after all.
the land half dead:
light enough to dig by,
not to find nails in a shed.
So the skies are filled,
brimming with clouds scudding along
beneath a grey gauze background.
Gates and the like
thrash the pitiable trees
steal their last red and yellow coins,
dash them to the ground.
Suddenly a lone bird
beats across the sky;
buffeted sideways,
it recovers, continues.
Hard to know its purpose:
whether searching out food,
or leaving or returning,
is impossible to guess.

For no clear reason,
next day, two trees are full of these birds.
Their pin pricks of noise
swarm in a white racket
with no pattern to our ears.
They gather in order to leave.
On the edges the anxious twitch and jerk
start up into the air,
see their mistake,
flap back down,
wait for the one true message.
They all know when it comes,
all surge up,
circle and wheel
like a stream of black rags
bisecting the air
until, again, instinct or signal
impels them hurtling out of sight.
We should expect no less.


Peter Keeble

Daisy Chain

Daisy Chain

On such an afternoon as this, I sat
in summer grass and made a daisy chain,
my first, aged four, all eagerness, once taught,
to link the little flowers. I see again
that meadow somewhere deep in Warwickshire,
my mother with her dreamy hazel eyes,
contented, sitting separate but near,
I concentrating on my enterprise.
And when she judged it long enough, she did
the tricky job of joining end to end,
then placed it, coronet, upon my head
and with her Brownie box preserved me, crowned.
Unbidden, half forgotten, these thoughts rise
of mother, daisies, learning, childhood skies.

Dorothy Pope

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