Inscribed on Emanuel Sweert's painting 'Florilegium': Man's life is a flower.

Like a flower, he comes forth, then withers away; 
like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure.
Book of Job 14:2

While I watched, her blossom

faded from the field

left no shadow

Now all life expects in this eleventh hour

we should revere lost heroes with a flower

But I shall not ...

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It has been so many years

since that moment of truth

when finally you were truly alone

It has been so many years

since you flew with the flames

as the organ played

something

and I looked out at the distant horizon

seeing you there drifting away

into finality

It has been so many years

since I made you a promise

I could not keep

You said

Do no...

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1: An Old Transformation

Her body

cold

as sea ice

lay before me

broken

by life’s swell.

I remembered

the pull of her currents and tides,

her surging waves and deeps

And I knew

I could no longer navigate

the course

we had set

so long before

As she lay before me

still, pale, cold

I wept:

for ever

becalmed

2: Lovers

Naked

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A series of 11 short poems

End of a Galaxy

A blink

In the silent depth of night

As the last leaf of the beech tree

As the silent tear of my love

End of Harmony

I see her dancing on the sands

I see her                                     as she sees me

and in that moment

sand, sea, sun, surf

vanish in the vortex

until

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It is so many years

since I felt some part of me wane:

all those thousands of days

since we spoke of nothing -

could find no words;

and even many more

since there were whispers

as we lay naked in the night

or in the cottage garden

beneath the harvest sun

It is so many years

that I have known that dark void:

deep within my very soul

and in all those long ...

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Thirty-nine bodies

                lay on the ground

                in the summer sun

As I watched

                workers carried two more away

Around me

                life continued as usual

                a hum of activity

                oblivious

Thirty-nine bodies

                on that square of concrete

                that summer afternoon

As ...

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When I have gone

what waits this room

with its vacuum

                where I sat?

Does

my chair sits sightless

musing at my absence

midst space bereft

                   my music play on?

After I have left

ask my empty bed

all sheeted void

                about my dreams

Does

my mattress dent

minding my long night wraiths

maintain my ...

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words

            no man should know

            or say

words

            no child should hear:

            parent, pray

            to be spared.

as he sat with his sons at home

and struggled to find

words:

he knew

            she will never return to us

he knew

            she is too ill

In a time when she was strong

for them

as her body weake...

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I find that I must live in a world

Where, between that desperate dusk and a new dawn,

And between many a dawn and its dusk,

The only reality lies in love.

To be in love in that first dawn

And in the dusk, was to feel the sun

Warm our very passion every minute of every hour,

Reality lay only in the other.

And beyond that dreadful dusk, nothing

but dawns and dusk and ...

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Time stretched as she faded;

Lengthened, folded in on time

Extended, never ended.

Eternity must have seemed

An earthly hell

Peopled intermittently by friends:

A nightmare dream of pain and daemons

What superhuman will

Kept her through those summer months

What need, desire or wish

Held death's sad end at bay?

In the end, fading faded

Light left, sy...

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                                    After Ezra Pound and Giacomo Leopardi

And so you were

everything to me, that is now less than dust –

                        lost, captive of the soil

That surrounds and nourishes my soul.

And so now I –

still stranded, umbral shade of past desire – 

                        left, am guardian of sad recall

watching branch and blo...

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In those darkest, darkling months

when both belief and hope were lost

when love was stretched taught beyond endurance

when pain and understanding spiralled

Still

There was some doubt of destiny:

could love be snatched away;

and child a mother lose?

A new reality to supplant all we knew

                                                                        and dreamt.

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The sky in front of me is pink, as I drive home‚

there will be a frost tonight.

Beneath it the brackened hills lie pinkly rust

And trees stand starkly laced in contrast

I see every distant twig defined, sharp against the pearlescent sky.

Not much later, I sit over tea and look west

to where the sky is left creamily gold.

Above, the darkling blue is split by a fading pink ...

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