Story

Love

You glance at me with that look,

I know it so well.

It comes from me partly,

Touches my heart but my heart is tough.

I wonder if yours is yet.

No, I remember the chinks

through which

those few bitter tears,

held back so long,

They'd almost dried

before they dropped,

Fell,

Like a sharp acid rain.

My mother used to say;

I love you more than life itself !

Perhaps you'll understand one day,

I'd roll my eyes ( inwardly of course )

But now I do.

There are so many things in life to love,

But so few of them worth loving without you,

I hope you know it one day too.

I see the heavy storms ahead and hope

I can be there to guide you through.

Devotion

It comes through eyes,

That gently smiling light,

Creates the laugh lines,

And the frowning furrows,

A tenderness in attention,

Sureness of touch in the hands,

The fingers feeling their way with care,

Body and mind held in suspension.

The constancy of these things is devotion.

- Dicho tomy -

Dicho tomy

two parts cutting

The beautiful mystery

that leads to growth

A division of parts;

branching and branching

The one that cannot be the other,

or part of it

The essential nature of life.

Not Yin Yang, more the moon in

its first quarter, then its third quarter.

The one that complements the other.

The dance of a couple where neither touches.

The one place here and the other one there.

The never the twain shall ever meet.

Unless the universe reveals its other laws to us and growth takes on

an other

p
a t t
e r n

Lockdown

It's been - how many ? - 313, no 328 days today since we were first advised in this country to stay at home.

Every day we have been told how many people have died from 'the virus' and I always wonder, along with everyone else no doubt; who are they ?

Are they old ? Are they frail ? The two don't always go together.

Are they vulnerable ?

What makes us vulnerable ?

When I think about vulnerability, I imagine openness;

a baby, a small child, crying, arms wide open to be held.

The need to be looked after.

A baby, a small child, needing so much to thrive in terms of time and care,

undeveloped, including their immune system.

Apparently exposure to the world and it's dirt and infections builds strength as the child grows,

but, not always. Perhaps, perhaps not always.

Pondering this I wonder;

At what point do we become independent ?

Strong enough to thrive alone ?

This is when I become the Devil's advocate because, actually, I believe every living person and creature is never fully independent.

Each stage of our life makes us dependent on or vulnerable to different people and things.

Should we be disabled in any way, at any point, young or old, then we learn about these points, these places, these states of vulnerability and we can feel stripped, laid bare and open to the vulgarities, the insensitivities of the rawness of our individuality and how very incomplete and dependent we are. It's a revelation of the fundamental state of being human.

As the human world order changes and the natural world order adapts, making huge and small adjustments according to what the virus, economics and human statistics dictate,

I think about how the presence of death in our life has become a norm.

It's something some philosophers and wise ones tell us we should always be aware of,

but this doesn't feel like the lesson we wanted.

I wash my surfaces and spray them with anti-bac stuff.

I've even bought a spray bleach gun thingumajig which pleases me at the same time it fills me with dismay because, all this plastic, all this toxic stuff, going into our water is bad,

although ;

is this stuff circular ?

Everything in our life comes from the Earth.

Being in the world, living in it, changes it as it changes us.

Existence is change.

That's it.

We have to account for it somehow.

Deep Winter

The water breaks like a bird's wing,

The shafts and quills intact along the shards of ice.

Too heavy to lift, I tip

The basin up

and water drains from underneath

the broken thing.

I want to keep it intact,

Safe from warm,

Hold it in the aspic of Winter

Small, fragile memory of peace.

Sadie

Sadie's running,

Maybe not towards

This end of history,

I can feel her lilt,

and that of a boy

I knew.

They're both victims of

Something I can't ascribe.

They're running,

It's a fix.

I hope they see things

that fill them with

eternity's

wings.

I can Make a Fist - Towards the end of a year - 2020

Did you ever feel a baby's hand clench round your finger,

How tightly the grip,

The delight,

Neither of you wants to let go.

December slunk in,

Like a dog with its tail between its legs,

Sorrowful eyes,

Guilty,

Apologetic.

The forecast was snow, but, inevitably it fell as rain. We gathered up our packages and bundled them into the car. It's not far, just a few miles up the road but it may as well be Mars because we're not allowed to touch or even be anywhere inside with each other. It's a rule we're all considering to break.

Earlier in the year it felt easy; the weather was good, we could meet and go for short walks, look at each other's faces, listen to the tenure of your voices, the way you hold yourselves, sense how you're coping. The sun made it reassuring, we could get out.

But now as the shortest, darkest day approaches, deep winter closing in, the threat of flood, the inevitable cold, our confidence dissolves into the heavy rain and we stand in the car park, handing over the carefully chosen and wrapped gifts, my inevitably embarrassing cake, like contraband.

It's dismal and so we cave in and find refuge in the car, huddled and shivering. We make light of it, talk of the coming summer and hopes for travel; it's possible, if we get the right visas, maybe a vaccination, or two.

You're young and it's a special birthday, one that's been marred before by the death of your grandma; we're actutely aware of the sorrow hanging there in the air, but we make our small talk, sending our best wishes through the undercurrent of our words, our loving glances, hoping you will feel our pride in how you've coped, what you've become, despite the dismal failure of the day.

Waving our goodbyes, we're determined not to be too sad. Look to the future. We're here now.

It's a gift.

Tranquility

What is tranquility ?

I read it is the state or quality of being calm.

I think of the words I associate with this quality;

Peaceful

Quiet

Unruffled

Tranquil

Liquid

Buoyant

I also read that it implies;

absence of noise

absence of violence

absence of worry

and this causes me worry,

because I know this is not life

Life is not the absence of worry.

I would like to be tranquil

but not dead.

I would like to experience tranquility

in Life.

We search for it as though it was truth.

I search for it and I try to create it.

I try to imagine it in the midst of life

and so, I wrote;

Time was relinquished to the waves

and the billowing white clouds blown across

a bright blue sky.

The last train might come and go but

there would be a bus and if not,

there is a footpath.

Tranquility reigned now.

She sank back into the sand and fell asleep.

Chrysanthemums

Shared joy in a long-lived pot

Shines out bright

In amongst the flowery firework display,

The white light of love and loyalty

Strong and supporting the red of romance

The symbolic heart,

Complements yellow's sorrow.

The whole arrangement is in harmony,

A memory, a wish, a gift.

Time unfolds its flowers.

Kinds of Light

I'm looking out through my window,

The light lies flat upon the landscape,

Some of the greens remind me of

a place, a time when I felt flat,

when the brightness of life had left

everything forgot it had ever been

until one morning when you open up

the curtains and the sun streams in to show

the motes dancing among the dull furniture

I think about dancing too.

Epilogue

Jolie Laide

There she hangs, his masterpiece and her own,

Immortalised in paint, painted over until,

A finished moment masks all that went before.

This Jolie Laide, new illusion of truth,

breaks the old mirror of imagined beauty and,

Up rise a confluence of feelings

As we stand before it.