Rose Hips and Thistles - by
It’s been a long Indian summer / and the hips are rotting on the beach rose. / I can almost…
It’s been a long Indian summer / and the hips are rotting on the beach rose. / I can almost…
Books in cosy littered room ,
Feet in slippered ease,
Silver candles in the gloom,
Stars in naked trees
Inna calabash
tell them that the baby
that count in them census already
Inna calabash
There’s this life and no hereafter –
/ I’m sure of that
/ but still…
Turned seventy, and not wanting
/ to waste the years left, half-asleep,
/ I’m stocking the shelves of a larder.
/
/ Each day is an empty…
I went out to the hazel wood, / Because a fire was in my head, / And cut and peeled…
Here, under the awning of cotton,
/ Tomatoes are heaped in a flare
/ Of glossy red beauty, and rotten
/ Sick-sweet smells of fruit fill…
You hold the sapling straight, backfill,
/ heel it in. A rainbow
/ pours from the watering can.
The rain was sliverin on the windae pane
/ when you gaed oot tae pick strawberries,
/ reid pockit moons, for the denner…
More rat than bird,
/ more superstition than fox,
/ you hang from that banyan
/ branch like a deflated black
/ umbrella and, when you flap
/ through the…
For a few days only,
/ the plum tree outside the window
/ shoulders perfection.
/ No matter the plums will be small,
/ eaten only by squirrels…
Moscow is milling with watermelons.
/ Everything breathes a boundless freedom.
/ And it blows with unbridled fierceness
/ from the breathless melonvendors.
/
/ Stalls. Din. Girls’ headscarves.
/ They…
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