I like moss. Patron saint of floral lost causesyou have to admire its persistencethe certain, resilient silencesuch blithe, unprepossessing paradox –utterly resolute, while so soft, so velvet. Survives, thrives in dim, damp places:up sides of crumbling housesdown slanted, slated, tiled roofs;the crack in the exposed wallshadowed lee beyond the garden gate.Invades repointed chimney breastcolonises the […]
Unseen, yet seen by everyoneAt the levée, one gentlemanAlone kept his hat firmly onThroughout, a boor before the throne. May each majority boast one,Stiff-necked, thrawn, proud, contrarian,Impossible, a fool, alone,With his hat firmly, rightly, on.
The old lady struggles, footsteps careful, leaving shuffle marks in the snow.
/ No shopping bag, so maybe it’s church, and maybe…
He has chosen, far nearer the end
/ than the beginning, to live
/ where, every day, he can watch the land
/
/ come and go,…
I don’t know what I used to know.
/ I don’t say that it isn’t so,
/ I’ve just forgotten. That’s a blow.
/ When you…
Let me not be tempted
/ to talk incessantly about my illnesses;
/ the love of rehearsing them has become too sweet.
/
/ And more…
I cling to the railings as befits my station:
/ a senior person slipping slowly downhill.
/
/ The world no longer our oyster,
/ gone…
I have, I think, most organs that
/ I started with. Some shaped by time
/ foreshortened, elongated, dulled.
/ I keep at bay…
Broad in the beam? More broad in sympathy.
/ Stiff in the joints? More flexible in mind.
/ Deaf on the right? New voices…
This ground this dream these myths
/ This time this place this river
/ We broken people, this ugliness, this empty,
/ Not…
Soon is the night of our faring to regions unknown,
/ There not to flinch at the challenge suddenly thrown
/ By the great…
There is one grief worse than any other.
/ When your small feverish throat clogged, and quit
/ I knelt beside the chair on…
