Menace

Beams spread honey thick
no matter what lies beneath
cloud-white egret elegance
or furtive hedge shadow
gunmetal grey with bloody hands.

Sending thoughts

I watch you from the window,
down by the stream,
looking up into the ramifications of branches,
hard-hatted, assessing,
so huge in my life,
Lilliputian beneath the poplars.

Nightfall

Dark gathers
clouds ink-black
crowd above the trees
I watch by stove-glow
for the dancing light on the lane.

Morning walk

Morning walk

I walk the mist drifts,
soft leavings of last night’s fog,
colour of full moons, owl-pale,
my face shot with sun-shafts,
following the golden leaf-dance.

Plum blossom

suddenly
the spikes are stuck with froth
black branches clouded
with honey scent
and the brindled buzzing of bees

once frost-furred
the plums are clad
in gull-soft drapery
heady-sweet
as spring water

crisp white
cut out against the blue
a railing of blossom
against the buffeting sea
the house sails

5 lines

Wind in the poplars and the oaks
branch-snapping
like the narrow necks of cranes
high in the buffeted night sky
so full of sounding dark.

A spring wish

daffodil days
lemon-sunned beneath dapples
bird-quiet
rippled with water songs
and the sky pale as a new egg

I can taste the turning
in the wind-whisper
riffling soft through the drifts
of last year’s sorrows
letting them fly

Sky fire

December dawn in crimson
black-etched
spreading colour waves
belling thrush and robin songs into the west
where embers of sun-fire smoulder.

 

 

 

 

Dawn yesterday. I’ve never seen such an intense crimson sky. Deepest in the east, and in the west a mass of orange cloud hung where the sun sank the evening before.

Mist

cloud becomes ground mist
the serpent uncoiling
detached from river stream’s silver scales
eating the green world
swallowing the sun

wild

wild night to be out
blustering warm
and on the hill
the eerie cry of a vixen
carried in the mouth of the wind