The Lane

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Years ago, the lane gave up its traffic

and lost sight of its origin and end.

For a while, it lapsed to restful neglect,

offering brambly fruits to the gentle

who sought the shadows on sunlit mornings.

Its playlist was the shuffling mouse, the wren’s

song and the lark’s operatic display.

Hips and haws shivered in Autumn winds.

Bindweed wound its straggly fronds round nettle

hawthorn and alder, enclosing decay

beneath its vulgar bridal blooms. In time

the lane disappeared and left no trace

of the footsteps and wheel ruts of its youth.

The Uncertainty Principle

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How our journey is crippled by the need

to put our finger on the wounds, to find

the focus amidst the dense tangle of weeds,

to calm the nervous tics of heart and mind.

The path is strewn with uneven ‘yes, but’s

and two plus two remains the wrong question

whatever direction we set our feet.

We hide away from any suggestion

that uncertainty rules our existence,

that wisdom comes from sitting on the fence.

The road ahead has no destination

and we hang up our boots before the end

and must find out that all fascination

sits by the road at unexpected bends.

Ageing

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Time is dead, no pendulum swings

and weightlessness sits in a void.

Only as the tick tock of fading hopes

Is swung by heaviness on our shoulders

and the relentless seconds draw our end

closer , does the shape of a life emerge.

The young who trip lightly on the surface

of infinity can smile at the marks

of experience losing the focus,

scarred by disappointment, hope and regret.

They don’t yet feel the weight of the chain

they are fashioning, that is propelling

them to old age and its powerlessness.

The String Quartet

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Did you hear the silence?

or perhaps you looked away

like the second violin,

distracted for a moment,

snipping the music in half

rough edged where infection creeps in.

They practised the silence

with bow arms choreographed

to maintain the idea of sound

to hold on to the song

vibrating in the promise

of some kind of cadence.

Without stillness, the silence

is overwhelmed by events

we had put to one side =

traffic stirs, dishes are washed

and the stomach rumbles,

and the song is forgotten.

The brothers

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The brothers

See the red wheelbarrow, standing on the grass

by the old barn in a bed of nettles?

From there it is a structure, redundant

in a land of tractors and dumper trucks.

It is a broken thing, for sandpaper,

saws, hammers and nails to make a repair,

to restore its function, to revive its life.

True, he would prefer some valves and pistons,

a puff of smoke, and steam in the axles

but he can see what it is, is the facts.

 

From here, it is a story, the motion

of time through the changing lives of the farm.

The redness crushes against the russets

of Autumn like a clashing harmony

in a Gesualdo chorus. Its glaze 

from the rains is mould, recording 

a tale of loss and decay, of a past

discarded beyond youth’s hopeful labour

to fade in wistful mists of memory.

Will they ever understand each other? – 

it is after all, the same wheelbarrow.

The unbearable lightness

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A gentle steer, a light touch that we seek

to help the proud to step through life’s barriers

is a gift desired not just by the meek.

Yet we would prefer weight to carry us

and we stand mighty stones on arid earth

to defy the winds that sand blast their way

across memory’s vanishing hillocks.

Soft lips and a warm embrace find no home

in cemeteries of stones and epitaphs

and vanish into the scents of cut grass,

into the dance of parsley’s bridal flowers,

into the evening’s flickering sunlight.

Even poets seek to frame their vision

within the red wheelbarrow, avoiding

the intangible weight of dark matter.

taking the plunge

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Standing well back from the cliff edge

the rain I can certainly feel

but the wind is a distant call

whistling a tune from memory.

Here I am safe from the chasm

that stands guard below adventure.

For a while I can pass the time

watching those who stand on the edge

and tease fate in the driving gales.

Sometimes there comes one who would fly,

would trust the thermals to hold him

and would defy the chasm’s lure.

Light

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and God said, “Let there be light”

and there was light,

and God saw that it was good.

Well, He was marking His own homework,

and he didn’t say it was good for us.

For us, He seems to prefer mystery,

or ignorance if you will, though I think

He liked to think of it as innocence.

Having eaten the apple, we now see

the light, and must look on horror and death

in the lightning flash of stormy skies.

In our discovery of destruction

we must bow down our heads and submit to

the unbearable lightness of being.

Grief

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if you think you know what grief is,

you were not there when it happened.

I can see no feathers, just weights

pulling down, giving life its swing

and its knowledge of time passing.

it is not that grief is ‘mystery’ –

too seductive a word for what

we do not know, for ignorance,

too much of a word for silence

where grief is kept in hiding.

it sits in the sag of shoulders,

sits in an unexplained stutter,

sits in unsmiling indifference

waiting to dissolve to sorrow.

Everybody stood

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and in that moment, everybody stood,

enslaved by tribal enthusiasms,

by the joy of escape from the self’s bonds,

by the rapture of a community’s song

that drowned out sad truth and compromise.

At the centre stood the smiling hero,

clothed by the tumult’s imagination,

basking in the hot sunshine of anger.

All their hateful doubts could be discarded,

loaded on to the shoulders of victims

too weak to fight back, too sad to sing

their own anthems of hope and liberty.

Only children could see, buried beneath

the crowd’s blind ecstasy, in the darkness.