I, poet, may write of love

and in that moment feel

a meaning clear:

yet my soul knows love

my hand will never pen

You, reader, read that word

and think to know my mind  

              I say you cannot know the love

my heart placed behind that word, only

your sense of the love you thought you saw

The poet can never truly speak

and have his reader k...

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And in that first wailing cry my ashes were ordained:

As the ocean acknowledges its horizon,

knows infinity's finite edge

so my cry knew a destiny

knew my play and my learning

my work, my leisure, my sleep

the evil of my hands and the goodness of my heart

my loves, my hates, my pleasures.

Knew my world: that tiny flesh held all my futures

and in those fragile bones resid...

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Night has descended on the fields

but a summer night never darkens, only shields               

dreamers from the day's dull hold

as I am wakeful, bedded cold;

                and the trees stretch into the faded sky  

Night has alighted on my mind

but a wakened wraith can only stray, its kind

vanish as summer's dusky night flies on

as I am lost beyond my dream horizo...

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A grey shade in the cottage shadows

a paw lick of sinuous silence

a tail flick of smoke

a pounce on time's toll

Like a smoke devil escaped the chimney

she inhabits the lounge at night

never settling

she drifts across the hearth

Like the umbral weight of her past

she settles beyond my sight

I sense only the leak

of light left by her passing

Like th...

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Yesterday

I opened the windows of my room with the night

I let in the stars and slept in their time

    I knew their waning

When I awoke

My pillow was flattened with the weight of their time

My mind was present in the immensity of their span

    I knew their past now

Today

I curtained the new day in my room with the dawn

I breathed in time and dreamed of the...

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Unknown reader, be glad that I have opened the door and let out

the dust of my verse for you to see an age after the words first found form on the screen, or

perhaps I have let in your imagination so, turning, you can see a single almond

blossom, pink amongst its pale russet leaves, to tempt your words out

Unknown traveller, on this day, stay, venture out

and, before they fade,...

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As I write, each line reaches for memories

lost, fallen beyond the edge of the world:

kamarupa dwelling in infinity, fading

when my lines do not find them

and my words fail passion and desire.

Eons, lost pasts. Which of them

could dream my frail dream of this

verse? Which, thrown

across the fabric of time, could make

nothing everything?

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Written in March 2023: one year on.

(...sees races, eras, dates, generations,

The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together"

Walt Whitman, Kosmos)

Only fragile glass

                                   holds the cold

                                                                night's times at bay:

each star above the beech

owning its mo...

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Written in March 2022 in response to Simon Armitage's 'Resistance'

We watch

                      the News

unable

                to comprehend

the horror that is war:

we see

destruction... death... weeping...

children who do not understand

      held in the arms of mothers

                who do not understand

anything

                                except

...

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Because I have seen

such small glory as heaven found

Lit translucent in the wing of a dragonfly serene above the dark pond depths

Lit gold in the sunlit pelt of that one white cat still beneath the tree

Lit in Spring's faint skeleton of Winter's fallen leaf

Lit in the fractal eternity of each flake that floats snow down

and know the pain each angel hears

Held in a single seadr...

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He fills no space now in my quiet room.

Silence. A silence that I fill with ancient guilt,

my words morphing into pain, yet edited

away from anger, leaving a cold darkness

bereft of his voice, leaving a blind sorrow

censored of healing hope: a quietude.  

Outside, the sun is blown against the glass

as it would lighten spirits, yet

its gentling warmth cannot thaw

the chil...

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Seated. Warm. Propping up my latest book; the dark

pulls me from beyond the cottage window

into the cool awe of a perfect starnight

a gift to me as I walk across the damp lawn and, turning

look over the old stone wall

to the fields across the valley and up to the hills

and the arcing rim of the night

Standing. Chilled. Leaning on my garden wall; the stars

call me from ...

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1
A story about
                an old poet
    and his cottage

2
A dream of an old mariner
                lost in Wales
    adrift on his words

3
A memory of
                a young boy
    on his maiden voyage

4
A memory of
                innocence
    lost at sea

5
A line on a chart
                between a girl
    and loneliness

6
A communion
               ...

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