Leafing Up

Damp, dank and dingy, this cold March day
Cannot stop the bushes having their way,
Leafing up in the morning gloom
Like a green mist drifting in coil and plume.

All winter, the shrubs with branches bare

Have rattled in the thumping ice-stark air,
Now, with nosegays of salad-green,
They are leafing up in a rain-crisp sheen.

Be it the hawthorn with its blood-snag spines

Or the osier willow in fingering lines,
Mintily-tinted where insects will tup,
Springward, the bushes are leafing up.

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© March 2015

Resignation

A sort of pastoral perhaps?

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I said to the sea, “What of me, what of me?
Whilst you go on to eternity
I age and wither, then cease to be;
Ah, think of the years not seen by me!
     Can it be?”

The sea in its thunderous winter mood,

With blackened waves and spray all skewed,
Roared, “I have no flesh nor any blood,
I need no love, I want no food;
     Like God I brood.”

And then in lisping summer swells:

“But you must flirt in sunny dells,
Exchanging vows like coloured shells,
Drawing sweet water from deep wells
     To the sound of bells.”

I said to the sea, “Ah me, ah me!

My girl has sickened, stung by a bee,
I fell at the plough and broke my knee,
Infection came laughing with the crypt’s key;
     Ah, take me to you, sea.”

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© March 2015

Death in Mouila

(Gabon, on the equator. From a photograph.)

A paper-thin paysan with ribs like ruts

Lies on the ground, his steel-wool hair gone grey,
His flung-out arm glows at the finger tips,
Those glossy nails the only hint of life.

A priest gives unction, sanctioning death’s putsch,

Crouching in sweaty soutane to lisp his say,
His hand on the man’s hair cancels all hopes,
Firming him for his last faint in a breath’s froth.

Outside, the equator’s sun packs down its heat

Which soon will bloat that man to gas and stench;
At crux point, limbs aching but nulled of strength,
Self-knowing hunkers in his brain, then blanks.

What is it then, a hand entrancing his feet,

A light which like a desert drink can quench,
A selfhood beyond intensity and length,
Knowing no thought or feeling, only thanks?

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© March 2015