Guest Poems

Journey I step into my shadow and the shadow goes away. How many blackbirds are sitting in that tree? If snow fell sideways would the flakes spin or stop? Old cats eat slowly. The colour I most want to inherit is blue, colour of clouds and water. When fog obscures the...

Monkey Night at the Circus Monkey see. Monkey do. Monkey gone. No longer my monkey. No longer my circus. Say goodbye to the red haired clowns, the tension, the drama, the spangled tears. No more balancing on an impossible wire, spinning dizzily up high with no way...

Somewhere to Live I like the way this privet stands its ground, the waist-high lavender, crazy paving, tubs. These winter trees, that never touch, remind me of Mother and the Aunts, how, in the end, I felt their twigs, like children’s fingers, tug. I want to join...

Absence In the quiet forest, nothing stirs. I hear no sigh of leaves, no woodlark’s song, only the moaning of the bracken. I see your boot prints in the sand, puddled with rain, the claws of a dog beside you. Your lips are silent as the pines encircling us. I follow...

Sea-Roads I have come to talk to you Because the days draw in And because I can hear the sea – The distant, long sigh of it. I hear the gull-cry. But mostly, I hear the sea. And, farthest of all, the thunder The ominous deep dirge of it: A shape on the mind’s horizon,...

Blue Moon Once, after the tail-end of a hurricane had blown through the day – the roaring in the trees like a passing train and the rain berserk as it over-ran the valley – once there was this quiet October evening, two full moons in one month, two lives wrought into...

In Churchill’s The boy in the fish and chip shop once felt sad enough to slice the soft white skin on the inside of his wrist. He has a thick scar shining wide and purple like a fat worm sliding up his sleeve. You’ll see a flash of it as he deftly shovels and shakes...

Cracks Like a row of graves the shrunken pots of paint line the windowsill each one sits on a pale strip painted by you. You asked me too many times what shade I wanted for our naked bedroom all the colours looked the same. Your favourite was eggshell white – you said...

Poppies by the Sea Orangey-red prayer flags of the past – they are opium – a secret incense. They are a doorway to everything – from a small room to an endless blue seascape. They launch all the people that you have encountered – the living and the dead. They are the...

For Beirut A cento I Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon, as beautiful as the famed city of Atlantis. Walk through the lonely ancient woods hear the voices from the Cedars of Lebanon....

The Other One Opening the blue door of a shed he had called The Other One, his old straw hat tips from a nail, doffed by a breeze predicting a storm. Its crown’s unwinding like a work unfinished, black band sweat salted - so much garden slog under a few retirement...