Poetic writings
Jack's Head (2004)
An easy hill to climb, with blossom in the pail.
The folkland coos with birdsong.
Jack's head is soon repaired.
Mother of Pearl (2009)
Reigning over this hemisphere
And dictating the seas, whitening
The darkest well and moor,
Cattle shed and stone in full light.
Now's the planetary time to bring
Mary home to rest, a conch song
Of how does your garden grow -
Through the open window.
As Through A Veil (1999)
Sitting in metallic pink-black and
Feeling airborne. This corner
Accommodates me. I spy a book of poetry
Titled 'As Through a Veil' and
Know I must be where I should be.
Saved (2011)
Claiming the Lake like a
sanctum in you,
An enlivening elixir that resurrects the spark,
Restores fragile fins, saturates sun-worn skins,
Blurs and bears the weight of you.
The evening mirror glimmers, breathes out and in.
A blown surface with light that ruptures,
Reflects all who seek themselves there.
It knows no favourites, only kin.
Honeymoon (2012)
If we lie still and sync in,
The cicadas settle into flinchless
Incantations, butterflies
Flit between monastic steps and our skin,
Breathing becomes the sea; ebbing out, fading in.
Fish Bird Cat Dream (2009)
Idling the while on silent fours,
Poseidon finds my shape on the floor,
Fleetingly blinks a kiss, then
Distracted by the Adriatic, tails off like a
Blue-green paintbrush trailing marine,
The unconscious mind's fish bird cat dream.
Isa and the Church Mouse (2006)
The tree's mind was carved into its bark, an eye.
Like a mysterious summer totem, speaking in tongues and wild.
We were wild before the years froze you, Isa,
And turned me into a solitary church mouse,
Reeling under stained glass windmills, seeking
The fractured rays of the same sun.
Agape (2004)
The moon's a silver pear.
Two-way gaping and getting deeper,
I can't remember where the time's gone or why
I was so sure you could walk on water.
#minutiae
June 2025
There are jewels of light on the bracken and lichen flecks in the forest.
May 2025
You walk past fallen camellia blooms after dark on a spring night under a near-full moon and you can almost hear the vegetation breathing.
May 2025
Small things matter.
Blue Himalayan poppies matter.
The score-line your nail makes on paper, matters.
April 2025
The joy in the primary colours of spring: the yolk yellow of a daisy, a child's red kite, a blue bonnet.
August 2023
The healing in a bird's clear, squally call against the sky. The rattle in a Welsh poppy.
June 2023
Meditation: the eye of a white pansy, the slim neck of a blue glass vase, a Mediterranean tile in blue and white.
December 2022
Steady galoshes of slush and the occasional syncopated water drop striking a surface and chiming like a fingertip flicking a china cup.
February 2021
Picturing the stillness of a nighttime sea somewhere, the colour of a blackcurrant and liquorice sweet.
August 2020
An argument of midges like little goading shadow boxers.
June 2020
A little bird's chirping like the sound of chamois leather rubbing glass.
May 2020
The garden's dark evergreen, yellow-green, celery-green, silver-green....And the hot mint- or chive-scented sheen of my dog's coat brushing against vegetation.
April 2020
I lay in the garden with the last of Monday, under green, yellow and blue, where I was visited by two wood pigeons, a host of midges, a robin and a fingernail tip of moon.