No words exist without people to tell

(Wystan would have purred.)

 

Is there a poetry equivalent of a medley? Stars on 45 giving a recital of the best lines. Sometimes a line will offer meaning on its own, cut as a flower from the bulb field in which it grew.

 

The collage that follows takes a line from each of the poems in my recent book “Returning Channels” and puts them together. Separate from their siblings the lines may have a different touch, discover a new beauty or have no meaning and worth at all. So separate from their glorious natural landscape …

 

 

Renewal throughout from baby slither,

what we see is the sight of others -

Liffey saw the brother’s tightrope.

Sky is shattered by undressed branches -

crumbling concrete cradle seeps.

We are all powerless – do not rage at the cancelled.

 

Perhaps the touch was warm enough

(cork sitting uncomfortably in a bottle).

When other’s stories became my own,

It can drive the shadow from your works.

Batchelor stands on hidden brass -

the yellow angle poise of age,

(and a help for nature’s conversion).

 

Coffin cold, abandoned, kitchen undertaken,

a prism that turns all colours grey.

Ford’s eye understood it all –

Margam stone and the sea at Praa

in tomorrow’s theme parks.

(Coffee and cans of special brew in case you call.)

 

The bats secure in bricked up portal -

each year a new crop of corpse and hate.

Beatings not of drum but flesh -

juice is sucked from a future harvest

 

Not all triangles are equilateral -

Nelly Saunders showing just once he could. [1 (yes it is a footnote!)]

Drinking too deep dissolves the drinker –

Hernia in a jar.

 

Open the sluices, breach the barrage

Let the channels return.

 

[1] Have a  look at Neil Saunders' goal on YouTube.

 

Hmmm. Not convinced.