LATE EVENING

LATE EVENING

Fog over cold fields,
Grey ghosts in tall trees,
Mist shadows flouncing
Into blurred and starry air,
Making shapes like ghosts
Slowly falling.
All silent and quietly beautiful.

Until bus headlights
Disturb this late evening,
Catching the cat jumping
The frost rimed fence,
Its sharp little teeth
Tearing the fog into tiny bits,
Eating even tinier pieces.

Next door’s dog kicking up a fuss.
Barking, yelping, growling.
Threatened by what it couldn’t see.
Just like us.

But that’s the ghosts gone,
For sure.
Until they come back later
To haunt us.

SONG OF THE BLUES

It’s a bitter cold day and the wind is roaring around the house but
I am reading the typed out poem of D.H. Lawrence’s BAVARIAN GENTIANS
that I have pinned to the wall in front of my desk and this makes me happy.
Who could not be happy reading this glorious poem. I’ve published my own
poem below before but as I think of my blog as a book, here it is again.
How lucky are we to live when these wonderful poems have been written and
this is even when I’ve got a horrible virus!

SONG OF THE BLUES

Blue stars in the garden,
Touched by the slender light of an icy moon
Trying to contain the storm
Throwing itself into a tantrum,
Breaking all it touched.
Spitefully turning the ruffled cornflowers
Into tiny blue rags
Pressed against earth’s vast darkness.

Howlin’ Wolf roared his blue despair
Into the emptiness he knew lay waiting
Behind the beauty of his own rich singing.
Set on making a cool and glorious
stream of melody
To challenge and defeat that darkness.
Make it jump for joy.

The Bluesman adding his song
To the precise and perfect loveliness
Of Lawrence telling of his own blue
Bavarian gentian
In the frosty month of September,
Its blue light leading him only into darkness,
Into emptiness,
Where Persephone was called back for ever
And Lawrence called for love.

Yet the Bluesman never stopped singing,
Filling that emptiness with the soul of man.
Bringing light to the darkness.
And Lawrence kept his pen firmly in his fingers,
Adding his song of blue gentians
Flowering in the month of September
To the eternal battle of hope over despair.

SPRING PROMISE

There’s been a little bit of flooding further down our road, water spilling
through the hedgerow and onto the grass. Now it’s frozen solid, little
banners of ice catching the sun and looking beautiful. All the same,
I’ll be glad when Spring and the warmer weather comes!

SPRING PROMISE

Ice on the fields,
Snow falling on bare hedgerows.
Tiny hidden primroses
Waiting to push through frozen ground.

Snowdrops already flowering
This bitter morning.
Reminding Spring is only
A breath away.

Full of light and colour.
Full of sunshine.

PRIVATE KEEP OUT! by Gwen Grant
published by Penguin Vintage Children’s Classics
available in paperback and as an ebook

STILL TRAVELLING

Even as a girl, I worried about the three Kings and their camels getting
back home safely. Christmas goes by so quickly, we find those in this part
of the Nativity story soon leaving us so, at some point, I accepted that the world is their
home and therefore they are constantly travelling – constantly making it all come true.

STILL TRAVELLING

We think now of those three Kings,
Long since gone, bones dissolved
Into the tight care of history.
Making the world creak in their slow haste
To follow that great star
Blazing into eternity.
Bright, fierce and incomparable.

As their leaving tapped
Through the long deserts of time,
Never stopping until Bethlehem,
Birmingham or any bus shelter
Or rackety garden shed,
Where quiet love and courage
Made them hesitate.
Hold them still.

Travelling along the tops of hedgerows,
The camels great feet crushing snow
Down through solid cold branches,
Plodding into the big field
Alongside the frozen river.
Breaking the ice,
Drinking frozen water.

Camels and Kings being out there.
Kings and camels still travelling.

SUNFLOWERS

For the new year…all our hopes…for no more war.

SUNFLOWERS

Sunflowers
And the slow trembling
Of tall grasses,
Calling the white heat
Of late afternoon
Into the open.
Into the violet shadows

Besieging
The small cherry tree,
Left now with a single fruit.
Numberless birds
Surging round and around,
Hungry for that crimson flesh.

Keeping an eye on the seeds
Of one flower recently fallen.
The newly wet earth
Cradling them,
Patting them down.

New life promised
From the joyful loveliness
Of the daunting old.

	Grammy Writes on OUR CAT
	gwengrant on TREE IN WINTER
	gwengrant on OUR CAT
	camilla wells paynte… on OUR CAT
	Liz on OUR CAT