Poetry

Charcoal 2007-23

Dear old dog, when did you see it clear?

The years have sped away from you like rabbits.

Now time has hardened likings into habits

and memories buzz, like flies, around your ears,

an irritating itch you cannot scratch.

The pavement now is punishing your feet,

the hillside’s softness lost to iron-hard street.

You need to sit. This seems a likely patch.

Lakeland Terrier, taciturn Cumbrian tyke,

your sit-down protest largely goes ignored

in downtown Hoxton. It simply seems you’re bored.

The youthful crowd flows round you, breaking like

a stream around a stout unyielding stone.

“Turn back!” you frown, “you’re too young to be knowing

there’s nothing for you where you think you’re going

except a meeting with that vast Unknown.”

Gone is the time the power of your voice

could strike the Fear of Dog in man and beast.

We’d flinch, divert, or just hang back at least

whilst checking if we had a better choice.

Gone are the days you’d take on any fight;

in Time you met a dog you couldn’t beat,

though still prepared to take it to the street

to prove the spirit in you shines as bright,

and that, beneath the ash of age, your soul

burns just as fierce and stronog and hot as Charcoal.

Washing Up

Easing brittle rim of plate
into warm wetness of sink,
a flicker of aroma rises
and, ah, there!
Recollection, arching like a cat,
swoons into a flash of what we shared last night;
and I stop for a moment, smile.
This, too, is making love.

7/1/05

Poem For a Sleeping Sooz

Funny, since I am a man for whom
Words are the loom
On which we weave our loves;
The warp of agonies concealed,

The weft of bliss confessed
All formed, or so I thought, a part
Of the proper garments of the heart.
Lacking such, love went about undressed.
Yet how much, so much more expressed
By this sleep-heavy arm

Thrown across my chest!

Published “The Spectator” Saturday 23rd June, 2001

Despair

Despair comes, a red-eyed crow,
thick beak tearing at my living brain.
“Cheer up!” you say, but what do you know?
I shake my failing fist,
it rises, circles three times
and lands again.

Published in “Dreamcatcher” issue 8, 2001

Calder Valley, June, 2002

Shattered tooth majesty of a derelict mill.
Flash of sunlight through broken cloud.

A bus disgorges Asian girls,
slender in shalwaar-kameez.
Streamers trailing, a flight of dragonflies
comes laughing up the street.

Knuckled up fist of hill crouches.
Summer here is brief.

Published “The Spectator” 21/6/03

Lamp

As in your childhood home there was a lamp,

Bottle of brass beneath a gourd of glass,

Which shed its gentle beams about your world,

A world of wooden walls & iron roof,

Of packed earth floor & snails in the well,

A light which shed each night it’s gentle glow

To give you just enough to light your way

Through pages to a world of gods & wars,

Of bronze and spears and horsehair-headed crests,

Whilst overhead a war of petrol raged, 

Of bombs, of gunpowder & screaming men,

So you’d grow & the world encroach with fists

And teeth and wolfish eyes, gazing, glaring,

Then darkness, howling, secrecy and shame

Til, after many darkened years, and pain,

A too-blue baby’s cry will light a lamp

To shed it’s gentle beams throughout your world,

A lamp that will withstand a hurricane.

 

(c) G Abbott 2017

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