All posts filed under: Poetry

Take Stock – #NaPoWriMo Day One

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It’s best to count inwards from the outer rings, all these layers of bark around my bite too often gone unseen by those deserving of my sharp teeth or even sharper words.   Evening is the best time for taking stock. When sunlight settles softly across my back and you have to really look to find the lost marbles rattling loose in drawers.   I can reorder the library as much as I like. It will be out of place soon enough. Each new volume stacked into shelves I will never truly fill.  

End Of The Garden #DVersePoets

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There are no apples left for picking, only leaves caught up in the sunlight and a slow breeze passing through. Back between my molars sticks a pip that my tongue cannot pry loose no matter the shapes it twists, the times it risks my bite. A sparrow in the branches sings, tells me there are more trees, more apples, but they are behind walls, and gates, and men with bright black guns. They tell people which trees are good, which ones are bad. It doesn’t matter about the apples so much, it’s more about the hands.

Honeysuckle Wife #DVersePoetics

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Cut me off at the ankles or so you said, stood astride my stump, saw grinned. ‘Not so pretty now are we’ either of us.   Spent the winter finding my roots, you brought on your hot house girls throwing out the deadheads before they even had chance to wilt.   Spring freshened up all that toughening from too many years the same. Found new shoots moving upwards, more bend, less bark to my bite.   Summer and I redecorated it all, cloaked myself in colour, announced my presence, my survival. Dared you to try cutting me down again.  

A Pygmalion Girl #WeekendWritingPrompt

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Why do that to yourself? Play around with perfection, even if it was only skin deep, and the smoothness of these curves turned your stomach at night, when dusk settles its hands either side of your hips, presses into the grooves where his tools worked you into beauty. Mounted you his sculpture for all men to see. Do you not appreciate how his love made you into a woman worth seeing?

Leftovers #DVersePoetics

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If I was my mother, and you were a horse, I would not wrap the lead into my fist as we walk the track with their ruined nissan huts patch up by ivy, so we can’t see through the hollow sockets of broken windows to the emptiness inside, always emptiness inside, and always me with a fist of lead to draw you closer to heel in case the emptiness is not what it seems.