This isn’t going to feature in the annals of my best work, but seeing as it was the “writer’s group” exercise that kicked off the writing again, I thought I should put it here. The workings are rusty, but I’m at least having phrases and rhythms pop into my head again, I’ve taken to carrying an Ipaq around with me to jot down lines and hopefully shape poems! I’ve got some in the pipeline now so I hope to post them here. Might be a while before I get up to the level of intensity I used to write with, or maybe less intensity is now the point…

Spring – for want of a better title…

Footsteps of winter stumble into spring;
As trees breathe their dead to life
Insects crawl from dreams of invasion.

A symphony of beaks tunes up
To a metronome of sun and moon
And the year’s new wind conducts.

Stream shatters over still rocks
To splash and catch cold spectrum
As it shifts to kinder colours.

As light lures life from buds
Motes of photons swim still air,
Ignite cold eyes, plough life

Into fields where cricketers wear white
And evergreens pause and wink
As innings change over below them.

Roots fixed and deep still take their
Footsteps through time, pause
Before the sprint into summer.

And it’s like learning to walk again, like I’m learning to write two poems, even two lines at a time. The last few months have been very creative ones for me, but I have been creative with life instead of with words, which we all need to do more of I think. At any rate, I have needed to be more creative, to do new things, to try things I have not done before through fear – in fact there has been a lot of feeling the fear and doing it anyway, as the book says, of late.

I went to my writers’ group last Friday. Well, it used to be a writers’ group, we used to read plays, write poems and stories, and we buzzed for a while. Now there’s just three of us left, so we meet, and we talk, and sometimes we read what we’ve written. The last time we met it was just getting to be spring, so I suggested we write about the changes of the season. I wrote a poem about that, it’s not quite finished, but a weird thing happened – while I was writing this first poem (after what must be a 3 year lack of the poetic urge), another poem begged to be written, and I wrote it. It’s as finished as it’s going to get, and it may not be very good, but I’m greasing the wheels, at least, and hope to continue writing one way or the other. It’s obvious what it’s about, maybe it’s all part of my renaissance, all of it 🙂

Simplicity

Calculations, fractions of hair,
Beads round your wrist
Like a rosary I count,
And pray with my shaking
Hands as flesh to flesh
Burns and the cauldron spills.

In dark, your anonymous
Celebrity sucks light
Into my eyes as fresh flame blossoms
And your pink skin
Speaks of sin
And the stain of knowing.

Peel away from
Sheets and each other
And the universe survives.
It is all so simple.
You simply turn
And simply
Kiss.

Dismiss.