As five swans, together, lift their weight,
With no little effort, toward the sky,
My eye, yet falls, admiring, nearer ground,
Where, on a branch that overhangs the lake,
Not starting at the egret’s cry,
She, unlocking not a sound,
Who hunting over-long would drown,
Reaches out her drenched wings to dry.

A grebe, unseen, submerged, passes near-by,
And on the shore mill pheasants, sheep and rabbits,
But clothed in nature’s charcoal-aged habit,
She busies not herself, but sits to dry.

And so a long in-breath becomes a sigh,
Cutting through all wandering, worried thoughts,
Just to watch her perch upon the over-hanging stalk,
And reach out her drenched wings, to dry.

Image: Cormorant by Sonja Molina, Instagram @sonlune

Chattering echoes and
light rakes the oratory,

Everywhere blossom and soft warmth,
pebbles, litterfall.

A gift of small blisters,
rhythms on the common.

Tenement magnolias
singing in thought, and silently –

Lift up your hearts,
lift up your hearts.

The hills roll like eggs
with calcium texture

latticed in spiky monoculture
on cabbage-moth time

terracotta nests,
and territories, more
than we know.

Two stroke chopper drone,
bird-strike and rhythm and blues,

lichen-crusty hawthorn
and flat, crawling conifers,
ever-green and bloomless.

Library thoughts –
chattering reflections –

settling now
like brown sugar in porridge

There’s something so real
and present and
physical about
the thing that counteracts
a life of imaginings,
spreadsheets and
norms,

In the jagged sharpness of
crumpled and torn
steel bodywork;
an old shell rusted to
delicacy and overgrown,

red fringes
refreshed by every rain,
a shelter of history,
a world for countless lives,

eating under tyres and swimming
in oil stained puddles,
ripening in rainbow decay.

A few birds, bravely air-borne still,

Flock in lost formation,

Struggling, as humans will,

For sense and murmuration.

The sky, a crumbling blue and grey,

For a brief duration,

Births the brightest snow-drop white,

As reason, revelation.