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.

‘I shall see my soul rise out of his blade, in a candour and in an innocense’
– John Donne

The tree is a shelter,
It makes a saving shadow,
For the livestock,

The grass moves like water in the wind,
Everything is always fading.

The blade becomes the ear,
The grain becomes the bread,

The grain flows like water through the hands.

Everything is pieces,
The pieces come together into forms,
The rain on the mountain floods the towns.

The water flows like glass across the pastures,
The moon is on the earth and in the sky,
Everything is always fading.

Beauty is the sharpest pain,
Love is the keenest beauty,
Marrow fills the bone and makes the blood.

The blade maims the ear,
The fruit becomes the marrow,
Everything is always growing.

The blue of the sky rolls back in the evening,
And the stars sing out a cantus,
The sky is more light than darkness,
Like shining grain cast over black soil,
And they call the night night,
And they call the day day,

And the day calls forth the people,
To make a temple of the earth.

And they call the day day,
That moves with such dominant ease,
That burns itself into our necks,
And into our muscles.

And the blade becomes the ear,
The grain becomes the bread,
Everything is always growing.

She made a bridge with her toes;
Clinging uselessly to my thighs,
And the frailty threw us around
Mixing our hearts with
Chocolaty brews.

Saturday in the vineyard,
Transparent glances all along the field walk,
Waking naturally,
To a flavour and a moan.

That was the never time,
When money spiders span oak branches
And held meetings
To decide the next phase of the moon.

And we felt the blackbird’s breath,
And the beat of it’s wings on our breasts,
And the passing clouds over Berkshire villages
Were as sturdy as Victorian aquaducts,
Whilst the fruits of our crafts and our labours
Were soft as steam in the air.

She made a bridge with her little toes,
As frail as frozen grass,
But everywhere about us
Rang out in beautiful song.

[Photo: ‘Hiding Your Light’ by Ailsa Naumann]

With our hoods pulled tight,
Working all a purpose –
An English summer in rubber boots –
And a fallen star under every arm
Climbing Hinksey Hill.

We built that fort like grown men,
And defended it,
Until the world shrank to the size
Of a bee sting.

Mirror lakes between us
And the greying vines
Of the parson’s wall
Were routes to other lands,
Trod to well-worn paths,

And the house-martins
Sang us songs to pretend to,
While we drank moonshine
from sparkling valley streams.

Just around the

Drywall, in lavender

Pinks and sandlewood –

Crumbs for church mice

And cherry bream.

We fell through an age of ages,

Made pumpkin faces

And drew up plans

On napkins.

In a cardboard salad

Box soaked bitter as

Black pepper corns.

Making love on a Damsen bed,

In the mean time,

All the while,

For absent friends

And choices left

unmade, like castle ruins

A yellow flush of leaves lights up the ground,
Where ash and bone, the justice of the caucus,
Got piled, enough to raise a little mound.

And not just Matthew Hopkins saw the profits,
And not just priests and jailers joined the chorus,
Where magistrates in Barber walk the coppice,
On paths that keep the tread of women bound,

To give their lives, that sheriffs might keep office,
And with each step they hear a crackling sound.