Three Poems of Mine.

(Five actually!)

Diana

Photo: Antoinette Keene

DIANA

My stone Diana crouches with her arms about her breasts,

Her yellow hair in ribbons tied about her head,

Always looking North towards her favourite boy.

Green shiny Ivy clambers up between her legs,

Enfolded in the foliage of untrammelled time,

The nearly thirty years have vanished in a flash of light.

Three times her ancient spirit spoke beyond the grave,

(I could not work out why)

Perhaps it was we shared some unspoken cosmic joke

That brought a crystal tear into the eye?

Three things, yet now I remember only two.

In vain my efforts to recall the third I knew.

The exploding light bulb right above me as I read her name;

Second a meeting at her Wadebridge shrine of flowers,

I turned, and my Diana stood, her eyes met mine,

Out of the heather posy past, like an apparition she appeared

Remembrance of a long lost love, a consolation prize,

Wreathed in that remembered, all-enchanting smile.

Ramblings

When the last of the apples cling to the boughs,

All brown forlorn and drooping down,

And Long Tailed Tits in clusters fly in to peck the softening fruit,

You know that summer once again is gone,

And all the Swallows have flown home.

It's then when sitting all alone, the shadows deepen with the clocks gone back,

There's little here to cheer or yet awaken joy or zeal or hope,

Surrounded by a world of deadly deeds and depressing almanak.

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields,

(Although the Saints and fields have long since gone)

Vaughan Williams emulates Tallis from its vaulted halls,

Where once with John we soaked up Christmas joy,

On cusp of winter's cold and cheerless spell,

In basement there, where homeless slept,

We sipped at punch or was it port? - ah well,

It seemed in season - unaware of what he really felt.

It's now Revel that issues over air,

What waves of magic wonder brings it here, from mind to ear,

Across the medium of air and years and Plymouth Sound?

Scarlatti's Keyboard Sonata, Skelly said was 'inward looking'.

I wonder how he knew?

Or was it just a statement of the obvious,

Because from where else can the music flow?

Now with Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin a different vibe.

We hear or see in the mind's eye the Tomb of Couperin,

(And who was he I hear you ask?)

Because I too was ignorant, I had to look him up,

One composer's paean for another.

Music passes time with note on note,

It flies with trills and different instruments, harmonious,

What other solace is there for a vacant abandoned place,

Except a radio conveying orchestral sounds?

The orange flames that leap right up from logs,

To mingle with the night time air,

Upward upward into space ascend?

Indifferent to my being here or there,

Deserted, waiting for the final chord,

The finale of Mozart's Paris Symphony, the cheers,

Whilst back at Portland Place

The audience awaits the fruit called innocence to fall.

November Moon

by Tim Veater

An eirie light shone through the glazing of the door,

Mysteriously drawn, I opened it intrigued,

There I stood amazed in awe, at what I saw,

November silver disc suspended on the blackened screen.

Though only six o'clock, the clocks gone back,

The sky was dark and winter cold too close to call.

The dazzling emerald hung low above the hedge,

Behind the silhouetted branches of the Sycamore,

Not firey like the sun, that earlier had set a blaze of red,

But virgin white, quite radiant and pure,

It bathed me in its demure light,

My soiled wedding garments clean once more.

Was this distant mystery, ever so large or bright?

Ever the sky so clear of cloud?

Ever the nascent night so graciously bestowed,

With celestial borrowed shafts of white?

As almost imperceptibly it rose, up, up,

Dispelling the impending night.

This was a moment intimate, just me and it,

Hanging there behind the trees,

Inanimate but with such familiar shiny gaze,

It's hard not to think it human after all,

Illumining our lonely night-time hours,

Without it we might fall, beyond recall.

Almost imperceptibly it rises,

Rises up into the jet-black sky,

Half a docile earth is watching,

With a million servile, wondering eyes;

As they have done for the ages,

Pagan worshippers, with savage cries.

Oh mesmerising shining moon,

How I long to see your cratered face,

To wrap you in my arms again,

Within my strong and warm embrace.

But you are far removed, aloof,

In distant cold and arid empty space.

The gulf too wide to cross, the time too late,

And so I stand transfixed in milky white,

Attached, yet detached too, so close and yet so far,

So full and bright, yet out of reach,

A poignant paradox and shining parable,

Of prodigals, much like those shooting stars.

THE PERMANENT WAY

Upon my land in Somerset/There stands a great dead tree/I do not know how old it is/But think it shared its years with me/When it first stood beside the track/And popped its head above the ground/Next to where on silver rails, the engines snorted round/Leaving a pungent trail of black-rock steam/ That we as children smoked - as in a dream.

But now all alone it stands/Dead to the work of men/ A monument to those who toiled/Who dug both out and in/A cutting through the hill/To make embankment further on/ To carry coal from Frome, there there and back again/To feed Bristol's chimney stacks/ Blackening once pristine city domes.

Across a mighty viaduct, the railway ran/And passing over it/The passengers looked down/On fields and farms and houses/ clustered round a church with ancient tower/Where on dark nights, the windows lit/With scenes from far-off lands and powers/ And hymns of praise escaped the leaded panes.

But back at the tree/It's roots are still embedded there, deep in the soil/Despite its branches long since comatosed/They meet the sky in disallusioned hope/Enough to make even a miner cry/Dead to the world and future 'sine die'/ We all are 'sine die'.

Where once we felt the trundle of the track/For up-line trains/In childlike innocence and earthy flame/Now nothing stirs beside the drone of landing plane /At Lulsgate perched amidst the Mendip hills/And rusting Land Rover with flatened tyres /Is parked where no one goes or knows./Momento of a dying age.

The tree of life and death/The family tribe and tree/How many now are left alive, to reminisce?/A multitude who only left their names and dates/To exercise the minds/Of those that like to dig/A pointless enterprise?The tree too big to be cut down, still stands/Defiant and unbowed.

This ashen Ash, still stands alone/Murdered and inert/The track itself is overgrown/ But all around is dirt/The ancestors look on/And wonder where the years have fled?/The characters have gone/ A symbol of the glorious dead/ An echo of that day//Beside the vestage of a long lost track/Once called the “Permanent Way”.  END

New Doors but Bad News

I didm't know him at all -

The man from Fayetteville,

Who now has been identified;

Apparently he was only twenty-nine

When his name was called.

Travelling on two wheels at speed

He came to an abrupt halt

And bumped into eternity

On the twelth of Marrch, just gone.

Not knowing who he was

I had to look him up;

How amazing Google

Knows no distance?

There it was in black and white,

In North Carolina

At the junction of Raeford

And Skibo Roads, a tragic meet,

Between an SUV and motor bike.

His name was Jonathan Huff,

He came from Fayetteville.

The woman in the SUV was 41

I wonder if they'd met?

She didn't see him coming obviously,

He certainly didn't see her either,

Until it was too late.

She, it's said, came from Hope Mills

But was ambulanced to Cape Fear.

I don't know why the news

Should touch me so,

I didn't know him after all.

His is just a name that appeared

At the end of a video,

Of people in green Slovenia

Renovating a crumbling wall.

Oh the effort and the skill expended

When the message stopped it all.

The star was called away

As a shocked and grieving

Friend, called 'sister-in-law'.

Their video dedicated to him.

What better memorial -

Than a rescued lime-stone building

From seventeen seventy four?

Not in French Fayetteville

But in a green Slovenia.

https://abc11.com/post/motorcyclist-killed-driver-injured-fayetteville-crash/16009564/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_YaXSEkcDs