Tag: spring

Taraxacologist’s Song

Nick1 Comment 
I've been foraging for borage,
Buttercups and a certain 
Salving parsley, floral
Wreaths and silence,
Foxgloves floating in their thousands, 
Beyond
My soul-tsunami.
Above love's undergrowth
Billow seeds of lion's teeth,
Also known by cankerwort, 
Irish daisy,
Witches' gowan, take
Your pick dependent
On your parlance,
Slowly drifting by
Like the quietly 
Glowing intentions 
And desires of
Subtle snowflakes.

No greater miracle we need 
Than Nature - 
Germination, regeneration,
We packed away our overcoats
And umbrellas and crumbs
Of conversations to stand
With crowds in verges,
In suburban lanes where
Carnival celebrations 
Passed us by, a smile,
A photograph, a wave.
For this self-renewal,
I saw that same procession
With elephants and acrobats
And other-worldly fruits,
A girl with second sight,
A vial of dust did sprout legumes,
A great-great-grandmother
From the coast who met
Her son exhumed; flags
And banners and drums;
And there, within
This entourage's
Centrifuge, 
A quite magnificent
Lioness, born from leaves
Through penury, 
Through belief,
Through ritual and rosaries
And into then beatitude,
Never better expressed than 
In some jagged leaves
Of a weed, upon
A kerbside edge,
Recipient of our wonder,
Thereafter born anew.

The Running Dog

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For all bifurcating branches
Sublime in their simplicity,
A dog has very little need

Indeed, yet with joyous barks
No less retrieves
Inherent interventions

Between what we deemed
Essential, or inbetween,
Or instead invented;

This contrast is at times
A subtle one,
Like sunlight through

Doppelganger-dappled leaves,
Ever since antiquities
In these dark-shaded parks

Of our entwining souls;
Yet if not for that twisted,
Rotten tooth of birch

In boggy undergrowth,
There would be no us,
Nor any running dog at all.

Beckoning

Nick2 Comments

A deluge in May,
Kerbside surface spray,
Torrents overwhelm
Dank country lanes.

Driving in low gears,
Waterfall chicanes,
Wrong latter ways,
Reminds me of childhood

And leaping over streams
Beneath a tarn-light bay,
Beside a dead man’s seam
In long-lost dreams

And longer lesser days.
Over there, a castle, see,
Its ghosts roam free
Through basements, attics

And these oak-pannellings
Overlooking a sodden
Village green;
Stumps received,

And sandwiches filled with
Cucumber and cheese;
The church hall leak,
Well, we can fix,

While men in linen-whites
Played winning willow innings,
Then ominous rains returned,
And a beckoning for tea.

Pigeons On The Gate

Nick1 Comment

I crave an end to endless days.

This season must be Spring.
I have just witnessed a return
Of two boisterous
Libidinous
Courting pigeons.
When I open a door
They act above suspicion;
A flurry of downy-grey feathers
And chesty burrs under
Intentions Nature has hidden.
A dog is defending her right
To galvanise all dust and dirt,
She chases her own tail
As though extraneous.
We are much the same
Through heaven and earth.

I caused all this
With my senses, with my
Tick-tock tick-tock
Effervescence surfacing
In defiance of my
Self-sabotaged demise.
But pigeon, and dog,
Also a headless chicken,
You are complicit, too,
Existing in my field of view.
The garden not long since
Waterlogged
is now is my synagogue.

I flirt just as those pigeons
With the edge of spiritual
Inhibition.
Back to my yard-broom,
Back to my shelving.
This air is the same air
Of a twenty-year old’s depression,
His lonely, self-misunderstanding
Breath. Unfaltering in your
Hungry unhappiness;
Dear adolescent self,
Let go of the fallacies
Surrounding you;
I have not advanced,
I have not progressed.
I dance with the dust
And the dust is my death.

There’s A Quiet Joyousness

Nick4 Comments

There’s a quiet joyousness
In these rites of Spring,
The cuckoo and the pigeon’s breast,
Seasons on a wing.

Dawn chorus is my necklace,
Morning dew my rings,
Sublime the geese-calls overhead,
Divine the dew-blade sings.

My needs no more than gods would bless,
I know I’m better off,
With sun and moon, a place to rest,
All other gains are lost.

Spiraea Song #2

Nick1 Comment

Sing to me Spiraea.
Blossom white-wisp floss,
I missed your softness in the Spring,
I missed her whispers in a stream,
Another year of loss.

My life’s a simple pebble
On the pebbled-path,
Every stone unpolished there
Another death to cast.

I sing of songs your bones would hear
When no man would then listen,
And in a moonlit clearing there
I tuned a light blue whistle.

Sing to me Spiraea,
By Autumn be denuded;
It’s been a year,
We dance my dear,

Like friends who never parted.

Dehiscence

Nick4 Comments

One day, this existence
Will all be water
Under the bridge disappeared,
A life as fragile and as delicate
As the dehiscent fears
Of a daffodil descending,
Or dreams in the oblong
Wrongs of my bluebell tears,
Or the crinoline ribs
Of a single chicken’s egg
In a bowl, on a table,
Her perfectly oval
Smooth essence of Soul
Controls internal elements
And hides the chalazae
Of you and I
In albumen and furrows.
In the furthest distance
Untravelled, a dog is asleep
On a Mediterranean
Mezzanine painted
In daffodil-yellow.

Outside, the ruffled pigeons
Are courting again,
Their chests as wide
As the yawns of lionesses,
Just like last year.
The glazed terracotta breaks,
And another ten the same.
I reach into my own senescence.