Saturday 21 October 2017

As Seen

This poem is in syllabics with a count of 8 syllables per line. The stanzas rhyme in pairs, ABCD, except the final stanza which has a single rhyme.

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That robin on the topmost point
Of the luscious spreading maple,
Stark upright in the June-blue sky
With his warrior’s red-blaze breast,

Lazily mutters a disjoint
Song having discharged his staple
Task of feeding the shrilled “I, I
Of his young; stood down, he can rest.

Lower, crazy-active starlings
Tug cherries from the cherry tree;
Its serried leaves like drooping tongues
Pant in the swelling morning heat.

Frantically clinging to gnarlings
Of string-thin branches those birds glee
In fruit, hanging like drunks on rungs,
Wings clattering like rain in wheat.

Lower again, chink-voiced tom tits
Crowd into fresh forsythia
Like scraps on the wind; voracious
For greenfly they trapeze into

Every angle, living on wits,
Heads blue as the banked aubrietia
Below. Abrupt as loquacious
Panhandlers they flee on the hue.

What a chirograph of being:
Above, the sparrow hawk seeing,
Below, the dowdy wren fleeing;
All sustained by light agreeing.

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© June 2014
 
 






Friday 13 October 2017

After Rain

Thistles and nettles after rain
Glow with edenic bliss again

When nothing pricked and nothing stang –
The serpent slept and sucked its fang;

Now raindrops gleam and leafage shines
And light enliquors tines and spines,

The only blot, the slug aslide
The thistle’s rainwashed spring-green hide,

Ulcerous, oozing, a mucous clot,
Emballing to a muscled knot

When prodded in its striate back –
Pockmarked brown and slime-glossed black:

Who can deny, post-eden days,
Old Nick still slithers at his ways,

Saucing spine and sharping bristle
Of nettles and the skin-snag thistle?

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© May 2014