Yesterday, 11th November, was Armistice Day in this country and I put up a poem for that day.  The flower in this poem I saw en route to Scotland on a day thick with frost and the first flakes of snow falling.  As we waited at the side of the road to move on, I saw it, deep in a patch of woodland where every flower and leaf was fighting to survive.         

         ON THE EDGE OF WINTER

On the edge of winter
Where the pale-lit leaves
All frail and flimsy
Lift the trees above the sullen darkness,
Leaving bare their winter branches,
There, where burdock and spiteful bramble,
No longer green but cold and seamed
With bitter leaves
Warm their feet in the dark earth,
In the roots that wind and curl into the darkness
Hard by the yellow matted grasses,
The bleached and bone-white tussocks
Dying, dying, all sad and weary. 

There, on the edge of winter,
Lying in the frosty sparkle,
I saw the bold, bright petal of a winter flower
Defeat the darkness
With life and hope and love and passion.

                                 ©Gwen Grant

When I was 12 years old, I decided I would walk to the end of a rainbow, find the gold and we could all live happily ever after.  Several hours later, too tired to take another step, the rainbow as far away as ever and fading fast, I headed back home.  I found something on that expedition, though, as I’ve never forgotten it.

      RAINBOW

Possibly,
All life exists
At the end of a rainbow.
Gold,
Fairies,
Witches on broomsticks,
A Knight in shining armour.

I don’t really think so.
The last time I looked,
There was only a crumble of dirt,
A grain of corn,
A rain beetle struggling through the leaf mould.

Still, we build
What we can
With what’s to hand.

                                          © Gwen Grant

Years ago, I used to walk along a deserted northern beach.  I liked walking best at night but, having said that, the walk I remember most was one morning of thick fog when a light aeroplane swooped out of the mist almost alongside me and the pilot waved.  My night walks were usually lonely except that I would sometimes pass another woman walking on her own.  We never spoke, never stopped, yet there was a sense of being together.

            STALK  WOMAN  STRANGER

This woman walks along a stranger shore,
With night dabbed eyes she stretches far alone
To gather in the thin skin glow
Of placid moon.
She arcs her dark mouth for its home. 

She hears the stranger sea and slow cold blood.
With pale stick hands she paints her all life face
Upon the stilly parchment bone
Of caught up dust.
The window of her now time place. 

Stalk woman walking sea and stranger shore,
With spreading life holes hugs the whitened moon
To her lonely pebble breast
In timid joy.
And dances in night’s flower room. 

                                                © Gwen Grant

                    CONVERSATIONS 

That conversation had its ups and downs.
Words like axes
Cutting at the very root of joy.
Hacking whole orchards of dreams
Into oblivion.
Throw those words out of the window,
Let the sun cleanse them,
The wind blow them away.

This conversation is fairly bowling along,
Words like flowers
Growing whole meadows of dreams.
No dream excluded.
Put those words in your eyes,
Let them warm all who read them,
The gentle wind blow them into love. 

                                        © Gwen Grant

                          WINTER IS COMING 

Winter is coming, circling around the house and garden
The grass already white over,
The last of the dahlias bending their heads to the cold.
Over the hedge, a fierce, clear brilliance sets everything sparkling.
Even the big tree, all leaves lost, stands white and starry.
Somewhere, over the fields, a fox barks,
Sending the plump little pheasants huddling deeper into cover. 

Darkness down the quiet street,
Split now by a square of yellow light flaring in an anxious window.
Not long after, the long car of a night Doctor pulls up silently.
A brisk tap tap of sharp heels urgent to the waiting door wide open,
Makes the sleeping houses quiver.
All those still awake, sinking deeper into their restless pillows,
Pulling the covers over their heads. 

Slowly, the moonlight drifts across the garden,
Lovely shards of icy silver picking out the stray black cat,
Courageous as any Roman conqueror,
Shadowing the grass with his magnificent presence. 

Then the creak of an old bench, as someone, out there in the darkness,
Newly bereft and soundlessly weeping clutches at the solid wood.
Praying its solidity will lend itself to their splintered grief
In this new world they are suddenly lost in.
This is the way it is, when winter is circling around the house and garden,
And people are lying in their beds, thinking. 

                                                                                              © Gwen Grant