When I was a girl, my father kept aviaries of canaries and budgerigars.  He loved these little birds and I loved to see them darting about like so many tiny bright arrows.  I remember the parrot but it didn’t belong to us and now I have no idea who brought it into the house.   I think it must have only been staying for a short time because, apart from this one vivid memory, it was gone.  I would translate these birds into bits of writing and even now, when I look at a page, I can still sometimes see golden full stops, exotic blue and green commas and semi-colons and the odd dazzling colour of the exclamation mark! Wishing everyone a safe and happy New year and may every day be a good writing day.

                  WRITING DAYS

There were canaries through all those years,
Endlessly flying down the days
Like little golden full stops
At the end of a sentence.

There were budgerigars, too.
Blue and green, chittering and chattering
Like commas or semi-colons
Taming an especially unruly paragraph.

And there was one great question mark of a parrot.
Where did he come from?
Who brought him in?
Sitting wherever he chose,
Staring at us with a cool, sardonic eye.
Shouting and swearing,
‘Shivering his timbers,’
Like some old sea tossed sailor.
Every squawk an exclamation mark on a really
Exciting piece of writing.

But I liked the little wren
Singing in the garden,
Startling the silence
Like a poem.

                                     © 2018 Gwen Grant  

PEA PODS AND PROMISES

Pea pods and pea straws
And fields of green oceans
As far as the eye can see,
And busy little children
Building pea-straw houses
Or getting lost in the green fields
As their mothers pull peas.

They were all told
To keep away from the small river
Where the Kingfisher flew,
Enchanting those who saw
The blue blur, blue on blue.
Tempting one child or another
To slide into the water.

Languorous now, the afternoon wears on,
The sun emptying those green oceans,
The red tractor silent
As little children are found and woken.
Bags weighed,
Coins counted one by one
Into green-dirty hands,
Ready for the waiting corner-shop man.

Time to climb onto the lorry.
Time to go home.

Everything will have changed
In the year that is yet to come,
But the fields will still be full
Of quiet green oceans bringing hope
Of a new harvest.

                                   © 2020 Gwen Grant