Simon
So small a thing
You seemed.
Little more than an acorn,
Doused in fur.
Life flickered weakly in your heart,
And yet, from so unpromising a start,
When, like a sapling oak,
You grew,
We gathered under the canopy
Of your innocent charm
And sheltered there,
In communion
With the primal spirit,
That smouldered,
Deep inside your breast,
Only finding outlet in your eyes.
They showed us all
A fresh and simple world,
Quite beyond our grasp.
Sometimes life’s joy would burst from you
Like a bud in spring,
And you would run
Through nature,
As nature always ran through you.
A bubbling brook,
Dancing it’s way
Through life’s lush valley.
And, although the soaring winds of life,
Left you so suddenly,
Becalmed.
The elemental you lives on.
Like a subtle mist,
It lies across the land you roamed,
Stilling time,
And dragging,
Like an ebbing tide,
At beaches of the past.
So, when
A dozen years from now,
Someone stops,
And lifts their head,
At the perfumed touch,
Of a distant summers breeze.
Perhaps they’ll feel
That they know you well,
For I believe,
It was always
Summer in your heart.
Driving home one dark evening, a very small kitten dashed across the road in front of my car, a tiny shape just visible in my headlights. It disappeared into some long grass at the side of the road, so I quickly pulled up and managed to catch the kitten and took it home with me. It was very small and we fed it on bread soaked in milk and we called it Simon. Simon grew up to become a fully-grown cat but had some strange eccentricities and of the many cats we have had over the years, he was unique.
Genius Unbound
His IQ was far too high.
Like a man gone wild,
He would bang his head against a wall
Until the ideas came.
Slowly at first,
But with increasing speed.
‘You will damage your finely tuned intellect
If you do not desist.’
We would say.
But he would just laugh like a maniac,
Bang the harder,
And scream in ecstasy
At the richness and fullness of his thoughts.
Finally, with a yell, he would drop
Senseless to the floor.
We would rush to him and revive him
With mugs of heavily sugared tea.
The thanks we got were cursory,
But we did it for Art.
Then,
He would retire to the attic for weeks
And write a brilliant novel,
An epic poem,
Or paint a surrealist landscape of the mind.
He would do any, or all of these things,
Depending upon his mood.
And we would laugh, cry,
Take him more tea
And finally, at his order,
Leave him in peace, to destroy
That which he had created.
‘To create even a transient masterpiece,
Is better than to create nothing at all.’
We would say.
But he would say.
‘Nonsense. The only way to pursue perfection,
Is to destroy all that is imperfect.’
He left only one work.
It was brilliant,
A masterpiece,
The fulfilment of a lifetime.
It was perfection,
A symbol of all his frustrations,
Desires and longings,
Captured on the walls of his room,
In his own blood.
The Tree of Always
Ancient; rooted to the universal structure,
I have always been.
My branches spread through time.
My canopy surrounds you.
Long ago I lost my earthly form.
But listen carefully to your thoughts,
And you may discern my ancient wisdom.
Long, long ago, a brightly coloured bird was sent down to Earth by the Gods. In its beak it carried a seed. When it reached the earth it planted the seed in fertile soil. The bird then flew back to the Gods and left the seed to grow.
In time, the seed sprouted and a proud young sapling emerged. It stretched its branches up towards the sun and it grew and grew, casting an ever-larger shadow upon the Earth.
In this shadow, safe from the gaze of the Gods, evil spawned.
Dragons
I remember when the dragons came.
What ancient magic
Let those great beasts fly?
With their creaking, clanking armour,
They blocked the sun
And the wind of their wings
Laid us flat.
Or was it terror?
But they had no interest in us.
Their coal cold eyes were fixed
On the mountains of their homes.
They passed, perhaps twenty,
In a display the like of which
The world will never again see.
For they were clearly agéd beasts,
This journey home their last.
And with their passing
Came an era, new.
But each man,
As he looked ahead with joy,
Looked back with sadness too.
For the splendid beasts were dead.
And man felt the loss
Of a world made safer,
Less terrifying
And, a little less magical.
Train
The train came at me out of the night,
Down rails that met at the edge
Of the world.
I was tied by the wrists
Across the lonely track
And the train came on.
I laughed, because
I knew it wasn’t real.
It was just a damned illusion.
Down two rails that spanned eternity itself.
My wrists cried out.
‘It’s real; it’s real’.
I laughed through the pain
Of splintered bone
And the separation of body from soul.
A bloody convincing illusion.
The bomb came at me out of the night,
Down a shaft.
It blocked the only light I had.
It took a decade falling.
Covered in multi-coloured patterns,
It was beautiful,
Supplanting daylight itself.
Then it hit,
And the patterns came real.
But the beauty was just illusion.
(C. 1996)
I was going through a divorce when I wrote this poem. Perhaps you can tell!
Time
Is the passing of time
Like the ticking of a clock?
Or a runaway train
Down an endless track?
Or the dripping of water
In a deep dark pit?
Does time pass through us?
Or we through time?
Are we always the same person?
Is the desecration of beauty,
Or the taking of childhood,
Time’s worst crime?
Does sadness lie at the heart of all things?
Swan Song
Through morning mist over the wasteland, half seen,
The aircraft soars with its obscene load.
A black swan, harbinger of doom,
Over white canvas, destruction assured.
The city sits, in silence, waiting………………….below.
And, as it glides high above
The dark deeds of man,
It sheds not one tear of pity.
Though it leaves in it’s wake,
Ruin and heartbreak
And the rubble of a shattered city.
This poem was an experiment in trying to combine two separate ideas in one poem, using many of the same words. If you read the entire poem as written then the image is the somewhat bleak one of an enemy bomber aircraft (a ‘black swan’ if you will), in the process of unleashing its destructive cargo upon a city. You may then read just the bold italicised words (but the first line arcs up from left to right and then down again, so the first line becomes ‘The white swan soars over the wasteland below’. You now have the perversely tranquil description of a lone swan flying over the destroyed city, completely oblivious to what lies below. (You may need to select a small font size on your e-reader for this to work, though).