Farm Fresh Birds
No one explained that best before was subjective at best. Instead they suggested that you were lucky to find a man willing to settle for spoiled produce so close to the sell by date. Did it occur to you the rot might be them?
All posts tagged: dversepoetspub
Another Poem About A Boy
They told me you were hard to puzzle out, a riddle wrapped in a conundrum. Like an onion, I would have to peel back the layers to find what you really were beneath. In reality, your smile was so open, I walked in uninvited.
A Garden Variety Hurt
I looked up what ivy was supposed to represent, after we called the man with the poison to clear the wooden fence panel right to the root. This creeping plant, that works its way between the cracks, and closes its fist so slowly, so quietly, that you cannot see the brickwork break, it’s supposed to represent friendship. I thought about you then, how I’d failed to see how deep you’d planted yourself until the moment that you cracked me clean in half. Like ivy, you keep coming back no matter the cold or the drought, there is no prying those tendrils loose, no poison that will make this shadow of you wither. I must live with the damage you have caused. I must somehow learn how not to crumble.
Lingering Day
On days like these, I used the playhouse as a stepping stone, to clamber atop the shed and watch the sun set, heat still suffused in the metal beneath my hands. There is a part of me that still wants to creep outside as the sun smudges ocher across the sky. Cocooned in blankets, I can wait until the colours leak from the world completely, leaving only the darkness behind my eyelids as a comparison to prove that the day is not yet fully gone. Is is strange to feel like their is more breath in evenings than any other hour? Tonight I watched the sky creep closer to night in the haze of my bedroom. Curtains pulled tight against the light while I burrow deeper beneath the blankets that offer no warmth. The cold in my bones is no fault of any sunset, but still I pray for it to hurry. To let me lose myself in shadows and sleep. My springs have frozen too hard for the evening to thaw them. Summer moves …
A Stutter In Seasons
I’ve started to feel like the garden pond. All inky darkness and sheet glass front, spiked in hoarfrost but more vicious than beautiful. Instead of budding, unfolding into spring, I’m sitting silent. Even the pigeons hesitate by my edge, pressing tentative toes to the surface, unsure of my stability. When the temperatures rise, I stay frozen. Inside winter had no time to settle. The dining room is full of green, from the fig tree to the pepper bush, in the corner a lemon shrub. A rose I bought two years ago is late to bloom though. It grows but all it gives are leaves which turn to brittle crunch in the dustpan. I am starting to give up hope that I will see any flowers. I know spring will come, I know this winter will end. I must learn to wait. I feel I might have missed the mark with my response to tonight Haibun Challenge. It’s not so much a budding poem as a frozen one, but with the recent weather in England it …
Dear Ba
1st March 2018 Crewe Dear Ba, Do you remember how you started your letters? I found three from when I was at uni today, tucked away in a drawer the envelopes broken open beside them. They all start differently but none are dated so I can’t be sure when exactly you wrote them. One is marked as Sunday and another with Market Drayton as if I might have forgotten where you were in the time between visits. They mostly read the same. You haven’t done much and are short of news to tell. Sat around in your living room enjoying coffee and choc rolls, telling me of the weather and who hasn’t been to visit recently only for Granny’s post-script notes to correct you afterwards. In Sunday you change tact, letting slip moments of history like castaway comments in the way you always did during conversations. You say ‘I’m an not a very good letter writer but here goes I will do my best good job Geoff only lived in the next …
In The Echo
In The Echo #dversepostspub #dverseposts #writing #poetry
Brew Round
Important conversations called for tea. Hands wrapped around a mug, you were always more prepared to listen when the steam could be counted on to fog your glasses and warm the last of the frost from your nose. By the time you’d drank to the dregs it would be bordering on cold but still waste not, want not. The things left to say once you’d drained the tea had to wait. That was just the way it was, We spoke a mug at a time or I did at least. You were always silent, stirring the sugar in. It’s a quick one tonight I’m afraid as I’m trying to pull together a word document of all the poems I’ve written over the last three years. I’ve decided to enter the International Book and Pamphlet Competition hosted by The Poetry Business which requires 20-24 pages of poems. It’s just a matter of finding which ones I actually have the confidence to submit.
Hope
Just a murmur, a whisper, that was all it was. Passed like an injured bird, cupped between your hands, palms hollowed so not to crush its wings heart a juddering drum beneath feathers. It sang to me like you did. It gave me life. It’s Quadrille night over at the dVerse Poets Pub. Tonight’s prompt is ‘murmur’.
Count It On My Hands
I’ve started gathering my grandmothers on my fingers. Ba was first to claim her place as right-hand woman. The signet ring’s a little worn but sharpened almost to a blade’s edge. Her wit used to have the same bite if you weren’t careful. She’d slash you with her words and have you bursting with laughter all in a matter of seconds. Something of a frail bulldozer, unstoppable at times, but even her initials grew faded past the point of a stranger’s recognition. Granny Kitty is a new addition. I don’t know how she’d fair with the idea of taking up residence on a middle finger but she wasn’t one to back down when the blood began to rise. ‘Up like a light’ my mother says. That was the Irish in her, and the feminist who brought the shields to defend her granddaughters going to university. Independent, clever, funny, tenacious, but most of all loving. The dandelions and the daffodils grow still. Even without Spring. It’s a free-for-all at the dVerse Poets Pub this week and …
