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,

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

Wild horses fling their thoughts

I’ve clearly stepped into my own Back to the Future DeLorean. A post scheduled November 12th was made live today. Consequently the post found its way into the back list. I can only plead autumnal illness and an addled brain. Please read about “Wild Horses Don’t Break.” Writers with chest infections sometimes do. P.S. Number III is my

Wild horses fling their thoughts

I love this poem – “Wild Horses Don’t Break” – so very much. To date it is one of the poems I’d be happy to have on my gravestone. Not that I like the idea of being buried in a cramped plot. Fling my ashes to the dunes and the sea! The wild horses of

1,000 Scientific Facts about the Sea, Poet Style

The facts of a beach-walk as seen by a poet.

On this beach, I wish to see the end of time

I often write to capture moments that I have experienced in solitude. Consider for example the afternoon that produced this poem, “On a rock amongst rocks“. I had walked out beyond the beach of white sand to the rocky inlet beyond the seafront houses, the fishermen and the dog owners. Each day I used this landmark as the half-way point measure

In this place

A post-breakup mediation posted this time last year, but dating back further in time. The poem appears in my book Emily’s Poems for Modern Boys under the title “A quiet thought”.

1,000 Scientific Facts

A Thousand Scientific Facts about the sea Watch the mist-spray drift towards the dunes: A mother is out with her children. The daughter plays with the dog breaking foam And the little boy sits beside on a rock. There are bluebottles along the shore today; many cuttlefish shells; a dead penguin, his flippers laid out

A 1,000 RAINBOWS, ROCKS AND PROCESS

On a rock amongst rocks When the last rays fire after which all will be still and ashed Here, on this rock I wish to stand to see the end of time. From here you face due South; face the end of the world, but between you and then blue-grey barrels roll toward the shore