School Children
Little red packages
with tumbleweed hair
and shiny eyes.
One, admonished for wearing trainers,
the rest,
writing poems.
**
Untitled Metaphysical
The hillside sings
silent songs
the notation marked
written in roads and villages.
The golden brass sunshine
rises and falls;
the wind strums flowers
a symphony
of bobbing stalks,
the thoughts of the composer
bubble into hills
travel into the blue distance.
His voice,
lighter than sound,
curls words
in the whispering sky;
my heatbeat is written up there,
clouds map each peak of a beat
from the blue mist
to the spreading future.
Beside me a dead tree
is a many-headed hyrdra
frozen by Death’s gorgon-glare
but under there
new worlds unfurl
beneath the shelter of this once
vital beast.
The brave hillsides march,
conifer mohawks
and working farms
tattooed on their slopes;
who will be here to witness
their final dive into the dark waters
at the end of time?
For now, white wool
darkens their sides
but from my vantage point
I see the truth
that this is impermanent
everything written
in the grain
of the wooden bench
on which I write.
**
Sweat and Cobwebs
Under hay bail clouds,
farmhouses thick like Hovis loaves
squat a Hereford valley.
Children giggle over porridge
and gimble like mayflies
in the angles of late sunlight.
The men part cornfields
covered in sweat and cobwebs;
their axes swing and curse splitting
the stubble of England.
And the women
decked in duvet dresses
kneed dough cooing
over clay cooking pots.
Under wrought iron storm clouds
inhabitants huddle
in farmhouses swelled with age.
