A tingling, a taste of the past.

Before it started. Before time.

Such memories would have been nice.

Though winter packed a punch that year,

Us two, wrapped up in desire,

Barely remarked the snow and ice.

For we, young and unbreakable,

Took slippery falls in our stride

And bought up love at any price.

Until the day they came.

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A time will come when we forgive,

Though that time is not yet;

But even when forgiveness comes,

None of us will forget.

We won’t forget the agony,

The sadness and the waste;

We won’t forget the insults hurled

With puerile lack of taste.

We won’t forget our cities wrecked,

Our soldiers blown to bits;

We won’t forget the fearful nights,

The lethal missile h...

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Let bulldozers rip,

Get spades in the ground,

Turn on the taps

In city and town.

Rules on the bonfire,

Planes in the air,

Bricked-up banality,

The fun of the fair.

And, all of a sudden,

The climate’s nowhere.

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Now that the weeks and days and months fly by,

Propelling us still faster to our end,

The needed action is to hold up time,

To slacken off, or better still, suspend

Its uncouth march into the wild beyond

And celebrate its capture as its bond.

But if time should comply, what must we do?

Display ourselves and prance around a pole,

Or willingly obey a quiet void?

Time,...

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Simon Grimes

Sought warmer climes

To cover up

Outrageous crimes.

Meanwhile, the wondrous wunderkind

Cooked a rabbit that he had skinned,

And then used daring to escape

By running flat out like the wind.

As the bise chilled the strollers by the lake,

A cheating couple rose up from their bed,

And pushed their way through carnivals of crowds

Towards the snow...

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The march of time has done for one good man;

America has opted for a fool,

But once they suffer four years at his school,

They’ll spit out their disgust, because they can.

Societies will dabble with the dark

Until the day the scales fall from their eyes,

When, faced with routine bigotry and lies,

They understand this is no campaign lark.

Then honesty and decency p...

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It’s been the hottest ever year;

The one point five is broken.

But in society round here,

These words are never spoken.

There’s still time for a reset,

Through measures tough or token;

The greenhouse levels climb, and yet,

These words are never spoken.

The glaciers will melt away,

And fires taunt the ocean,

But in the workplace or at play,

These words are...

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On winter days, with frosted breath,

We wander to the warm, great hall

To see this sacred scene once more.

A mother mourns her perished son,

As mothers do across the world,

While washed-up men, most often old,

Pick off the innocent for sport.

Grouped women, tethered in their grief,

Mop up the personal effects,

Doused in their humid, sodden tears.

Soon, beyond anger, b...

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The kiddie-giggling boy-men types,

Who shape our tastes and fuel our gripes,

Are like a zebra with no stripes.

Their views today are painted on;

Those of the past are long, long gone.

They rule the culture like machines,

And serve up, bite-sized, on our screens,

An option menu for our dreams.

The bad ones will be swept away;

Nice shall prevail day after day.

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There but for the grace of God, I thought,

As he rose from his place on the pavement

And stumbled to the shelter for some soup.

Fifty, probably, but looked ten years more.

Unshaven, stinks, frankly, but still too proud

To ask for a bath. How did he get here?

Not long ago, he had a job, a spouse;

Then both disappeared and his home with them.

‘Bloody fool,’ he mumbled, ‘no di...

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