And

a poem to be paired with With And, another word – verboten in excess, the Creative Writing Rules would warn. And then another thing And, and, And, and. Dandy and, Like but, not to be ushered in at sentence starts. And so for years, and carefully was placed or erased. But now the rules are

Things you do with things

I am preparing this blog on the day of the autumn equinox 2021. At 7am-ish, the big, white moon was still in the sky already blue with morning light. I took a moment to log the scene in my poet’s files: the sun had risen in the East, on the far side of my loft,

A correct map of 29 Columbine Road

would include the corner honeysuckle hedge and two houses with high walls. Not ours, at first. When did it change? A pink hibiscus in the corner bed is where the hiding-place might be. Two white-yellow oleanders each side of the gate, their seeping white sap not safe. The wet path, too, when it rains the

Bump in the road

Normally reliable suffered a rare failure, taking over on the second day Before grinding to a halt. We’ve experienced an anomaly which made shutdown a precautionary measure. It brought a premature end. It’s crazy: The media and everything. When I was in high school, as part of an English literature exam we were given a

all breakfast?

The muse had sent virtual sustenance: a simple bowl of porridge supporting a few red raspberries. The image nourished my desk-bound soul.

Supportasse Boughs

Supportasse Boughs The blossoms have come! The blossoms are here. On parade, white ruffs of spring’s courtiers. 24/3/2015 — Today I present the second of the two poems about spring blossoms. These lines, indeed like those of “March Burst” (posted last week) and many of my ‘sushi’ poems, owes a debt to Ezra Pound’s “In

Ulterior motives

It was very suspicious the way that whale rolled over and opened its mouth for tips, then set fireworks to the water gods from its blowhole. — Whales have featured in my poetry before. Like sluice gates and bears, whales prefigure as a childhood fascination. In my first or second year of school, we learnt

The call home

The tides of tomorrow and tomorrow and the next tomorrow sweep into crevices of shored shells. The waves nudge these hollows of yesterday’s habitat into the barrels of tomorrow, tomorrow and the next tomorrow. There the shored shells break with tomorrow, tomorrow and another tomorrow dashed to granules that lip the tideline. Salted foam seeps

Gazing, as we do

At the beginning of this month I wrote of the bumper crop of archive poems for November. Here are the last few from the files of 2012 and 2013: A Bequest of Wonder, a poem inspired by a painted banner of Chinese silk, a Chinese artist’s portrait and two detailed Shunga prints. I do. Do you?, in which all the antics

Christmas glee

Christmas is less than a month away. There’s still time to order a book of BeadedQuill’s poetry for someone special. Even non-poetry readers love the short and pithy ‘sushi‘ verses. There is a choice of three titles: The most recent publication, In the Ocean: a year of poetry offers a bumper 104 poems. Over 52