Category: Poetry

 TANTALIZING POSSIBILITIES

                TANTALIZING POSSIBILITIES

We fall in love on the roll of a dice,
A chance meeting.  Chancing everything on a meeting.
As we plain and seductive creatures
Remain wilfully unaware of the power of our own deep seduction.
For it is we who snap the bolt shut on death and boredom.

So we are always ready to catch some lovely confection
In some other plain beauty.  Some sweetness that draws us in
Until we are in so deep, all that is left is for us to declare
That this is the love which will last for ever,
Outliving any grain of sand or petal of a fading flower.

This love cuts out temptation.  Ends the pull of new desire,
Deletes that relentless ache for someone new.

We make promises quiet as silk slipping over moonlight.
We will love to the end of time, or, at the very least,
We hastily prevaricate, until the end of its own time.

We offer promises aloud, tying them up with a gold ring
Or two.  Often, two. Or with the ringpull of a thin tin can.
But gold or tin, nothing can lock up temptation.
Nothing stop that sudden surge of desire
For a tantalizing possibility inevitably leading to a sorry ending,
Or to a new and bitter beginning.

Nothing, that is, but love, which, as we fully understand,
Happens on the throw of a dice.

                                                        ©2020 Gwen Grant

LITTLE BROWN HENS AND RED

 Where we lived when I was a girl, most of the gardens
around us were like my Dad’s. Full of vegetables, fruit,
flowers and hens. They were beautiful gardens and I
remember our garden with great fondness. 

  LITTLE BROWN HENS AND RED

My father’s garden was full of little brown hens
High stepping, tippy tapping in and out of the daffodils,
Pecking at the Spring mint, settling in the potato patch,
Always protesting, always complaining.
Not enough of this.  Too little of that.
The wicked tortoiseshell cat pinning them down
With eyes greener than the very grass they trod on.

They would crowd around the kitchen door,
Indignant little bodies demanding hen justice.
But they liked their bit of my father’s garden
With worms trying to live quietly beneath them.

Until my cousin came with his hard hands,
Hungry eyes and a heart intent on killing,
Then I went out shouting,
Scattering the little brown hens and the red,
Causing the dark cockerel
To turn his bitter, livid eye on my hateful presence.

Squawking, they fled, hiding under the hen coop.
Darting into the rhubarb leaves at the back of the tree.
But when my cousin kept coming, when his boots broke
The sunny daffodils, I pushed him so hard, he fell over,
I didn’t care about him.

For my little red hens and brown,
The arrogant cockerel with his angry eyes
All lived to tuck themselves up again
And sleep their tiny pulsing sleep.

To wake in the morning,
Ready for another really interesting day. 

                                          ©2020 Gwen Grant                        

PEA PODS AND PROMISES

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  

BUT THERE’S HOPE…….

 

BUT THERE’S HOPE…….

We thought that we were stronger far
Than Old Man Time.
That hand-in-hand we could out-dance
The Lady of the Hours.
That every moment was forever
At our beck and call,
And we would be always young and lovely
As the Spring-time flowers.

We half understood when this one
Turned their face unto the wall,
When that one couldn’t get
A second breath.
But we were slow to understand
That Time is iron,
In its iron will to bring about
Our iron deaths.

Yet when all is said and done and told,
We ever understood that love turned
Iron into gold.


                               © 2017 Gwen Grant