On a cold, dark and grumpy morning, I thought how wonderful it would
be to look out on oranges and lemons.  Such generous and hopeful fruits.

     ORANGES AND LEMONS 

We dream of lemon trees,
Lemons clean and sharp,
Shining through the hunched up
Unwilling darkness
Of a garden sunk in frost. 

Our dreams grow wilder,
More voluptuous,
Wishing orange trees
In our small patch,
Each little fruit a captured sun. 

Oranges and lemons,
Whose deep beauty
Brings sun and moon
Into our enraptured
Eyes and hands. 

          © 2020 Gwen Grant

Whenever we go north, we pass a small field which
is so beautiful, we always plan to stop one day and
walk into it.  We’ve seen it in snow and in sunshine
and it always looks totally lovely.  It’s clearly very
old, the stone walls have tiny curling ferns in the
cracks and behind it is a rising slope of hill.

   A SCOTTISH FIELD 

That ancient little field
Has always been there,
With its grass cropped short,
Its stone walls dusty
In the morning sun. 

Each time we come this way,
We say that one day
We will sit in the middle of that field.
Pluck tiny blades of grass
And wind them round our fingers. 

But this is a dream
That seems never to come true.
Yet even whilst we’re swooping past
In a cloud of elegiac dust,
Still we hold on to it.  

                    © 2020 Gwen Grant

 

    SUMMER LOVERS

The golden fields lie quiet
As an old Sunday morning,
Hot and languorous as tired Lovers
Lying in that silky light,
One half dazed with heat,
One envying the fitful shadows
Playing on the beloved face,
Bodies so closely entwined,
Even the delicate purse flower
Cannot find space between them,
To grow.
Until the violet haze of their petals
Quivering in the small movements beside them,
Fade away to nothing.

                      ©2020 Gwen Grant.

We travelled down this road in northern Scotland late one evening and it was so wreathed in a heavy grey mist that when the road dipped down, we couldn’t even
see the hedgerows. As we moved higher, however, the mist thinned out enough
so that it looked like long folds of silk blowing across the fields. Then the moon appeared and the sky and the road looked just like this.

NIGHT ON A COUNTRY ROAD

There were six angels playing in the sky tonight,
Tossing stars to each other with easy grace,
Their long grey skirts whirling
Over the country road beneath them.

All was still.
All was silent.
All beauty just a memory,

Until steady beams of light
Came shining down the darkness,
Startling the flowers into sudden radiance,
Chasing the twisty grey smokiness
Over the hedgerows,
As the lovely, familiar sound of a tractor
Came rolling through the air.

Then the whisper of grass
As a rabbit tracked through it,
The long, long sigh of an owl’s wings
And the hoarse, sweet sound of the tractor,
Rose up as a prayer.

© 2018 Gwen Grant

---

   STANLEY PRICE HAS GONE AWAY

Stanley Price
Played on the street every night,
Built Go-Karts
Out of old pram wheels
And apple boxes
That smelt of sweet apples.

Stanley talked all the time
Of what he was going to do
When he grew up.

His mother hated to hear him,
Knowing Stanley was planning
To go a lot further
Than the old quarry,
Much further than the sandy river,
Certain once he was gone,
He would never open
Her front door again.

And that was the end
Of camphorated rubs for ever.

             © 2020 Gwen Grant