A day

A day

A day of pewter and dull gold,
river running quicksilver and slow green,
banks sloping steeply to grey pebbles.

River runs low, racing over black rocks,
where stilt-leg birds hunt, the air is full
of water music, herons’ hoarse crying,

and river air is drenched in warm leaf-gold.

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Unsleep

Unsleep

Behind the eyes, the migraine flicker,
grainy film, silent, rapid, disjointed.
Night, eyes wide, the film reels on.

Window-framed, lightning flashes,
silent storm, a whole sky white hot,
starless, eaten by fire.

Dawn drenches without turning off the light.

And on the eighth day

I wrote this 7×7 poem and then rewrote it as a sevenling.

And on the eighth day

The days burn like touchpaper,
the blue throbs, fierce pulse beating,
and the bare earth is riddled
with holes, swept of all beauty.
Moles, mice, nothing lives beneath
the field’s cracked skin, lifeblood drained
into the deep, mocking core.

Sevenling (The days burn)

The days burn blue and bronze
with a heavy throb of gongs and drums—
a buzzard glides, mewling.

Chicory blue fades ash grey
into the orange dust,
where black holes gape like mouths.

Roots are white bones, feathered spring flown.

Sevenling: Solstice

Shortest day sinks into sea depths
of grey rain and cloud falling,
mist rising.

No light in the sky to fail and herald the longest night,
and no sound
but the drip of water from the eaves.

Somewhere, they say, Christmas is playing.

Some mornings

the mist comes down,
rolls from the high land
where the sun peers, cool gold

through a spray of surf, pearl
ocean vapour, and behind,
the glorious blue stretches,

unmarked, unribbed and silent.

Winter sun sevenling

The sun shines in bland bands
of bleak light, weak-warm
and the yellow lost its heart.

It falls flat and famished
across the wintry green,
and I look to the hollows in the hedge

for rags of the soft night.

Evening sevenling

In the porch a rising moon
a bat
and the silver light of mist rising

through the window in the west
a sea of gold and pinking
shearing stalks black and straight

drowning in a soft sea of light.

Sevenling: Requiem for a cargo

This news item was never considered as interesting as whether Messi was going to leave Barcelona or not.

In the China Seas, a storm,
in the storm, a ship, a cargo, sinks,
the crew have only life-jackets.

In a storm the ship goes down,
with all hands, forty men, and only two
come back, the rest are lost, the ship,

and the cargo of six thousand cows.

Sevenling: Eternal summer

A day of sun and skimming swallows,
swimming with bird fins, torpedo rolling
and the soft-feathered, light-flickering flocks of warblers.

A summer day of fledgling-flutter
in low branches, where green light plays with gold,
grasshoppers, moveable feasts,

and we all pretend it will last forever.

Sevenling: Searching deep

Cooler the air and restless

this time the rain-damp lingers

voices carry of irritable crows.

 

Trees hang still tired after the night rain

the sun returns fitfully between stray clouds

we put on dark glasses, grasping at fleeing summer

 

while beneath the grass, roots groan, dig deeper, still dry.