Farmer’s Market

My mother took me to market
Past the squealing pigs, penned
And the rabbit shed, ragged red furry bellies
Hanging beneath high pitched corrugate,
On the floor blood in small sticky pools;
She took my hand and pulled me away
From the twitching noses in small cages;
Over rusty and dented gates 
Cow-eyed stares, amid cud and slurry
A chord of life, that sounds
Dissonant in the pungent air.

I took my mother to the market
For scented soaps and artisan bread
Hand crafted and cruelty free, 
Past hanging bundles of lavender,
To peruse hemp stitches and country chutney
Made in a stainless kitchen of steel and quartz;
The food truck sell donuts by the dozen,
Fragrant grease and sugar and line-ups, 
Cotton candy and children spin
To the CD selling folk quartet
Next to neatly tied organic greens,
This is nice dear, she said.

Mapping

 
  
 Have you ever wanted to go home,
 Struck by a need so intense and so sudden
 That it took your breath away?
 A call back, tugging at you
 From a picture or a name  
 Relegated to then and not to now.
 
 A home that has been outgrown
 A home that does not fit all the angles  
 And curves of so many years,
 A home that has not been
 For longer than it was.
 
 Yet, whether it drifted away
 Left behind without thought,  
 Or was rejected with determined intent,
 There lives that dormant tell inside of you,  
 Anchored to your bones, whatever the flesh pretends,
 Time forgets that you are here and not there,  
 Or maybe it never cared in the first place.
 
 And that word slips around the tongue
 And says, home,
 When what you meant to say was:
 Where I used to live.
 Where I once was.
 When I was a child.
 Where I no longer belong.
  
 Do the trees remember when you last passed by,
 Dappled light as you biked down silent lanes?
 Do the rivers mourn that you never walk their banks
 To splash in the gravel shallows anymore?
 Did the corner store where you traded pennies,
 Record for posterity, your taste in candy?
 
 Impassive, they still call your name.
 One, two, many moves,  
 Months, years, decades, allied to  
 Countries, oceans and maybe a sea.
 Answer or suppress, the word remains,
 Even when we do not.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Neophyte

At arm's length,
A vanishing point
Consistent and distant,
I made promises to you
And outgrew them too soon;
Missing but never missed,
One piece of the puzzle
For a picture forever
Obscured by the face
In the mirror;
You and I,
Living in anxious expectation
Of a life just around the corner,
There's no colder comfort
Than the gift of prescience;
There are days
When the thought of you
Is less than a memory,
Quieter than the fading echo
Of a whisper swallowed by the wind,
But more than that shadowed wraith
Caught in a sideways glance;
I can’t remember
That I ever forgot
The answer
To the question
I never thought to ask.

Causeways

And the starlings swirling murmuration
Billowing, blooms across the salmon sky
A burst of flight and shrill hesitations,
We walk together where the buttercups lie;

Low and rough, you would sing to me
Of fields and fairs and days long gone,
Through the dwindling blue of a summer’s eve
Of maidens and lovers and their songs;

Some things that can never leave the past,
Swept under the old bridge arch of cooling stone
Where the river entwines with the meadow grass,
Like the notes of a song and this child now grown.

Time Piece

After the war
We don’t talk
Of then,
It’s only now
We pay lip service
To the daily ins and outs
And ups and downs
Of pushing back
The coverlets
And getting dressed
Reminding ourselves
To smile
And greet strangers
On the street,
Politely nod
Tip a hat to
The house where I grew
Is now an empty pavement
Rubble swept away
I cannot show our children
The walls I climbed
Or the corner store
Where I spent my pennies,
You won’t speak
Of your days away
They are there
When you are not,
Even as you sit
By the evening fire
A thousand stories
Left untold
Committed to cold seas
And far shores,
We knew no heroes
Only survivors
The fading ribbon left in a dresser drawer
A thanks for taking part,
A photograph taken
Like its subject
When they were
Beautiful and young
Forever twenty-one,
Souvenirs pieced
With everyday clutter
It’s not that we remember
It’s that we can’t forget.

Thursday’s Child

The apple blossom would always come
Too late
To celebrate the stretch of
My uncertain skin,
Spring sauntered in,
Teasing taunts, all wry smiles,
I, oblivious to the undertow of party lies;
There was an old orchard at the end of my country mile,
I would lose myself over the meadow,
Under the trees
To follow the river through the dusk,
Fistfuls of buttercups
Offered as penance for cold suppers waiting;
Father Blackbird would call to me
From the branches
That the cherry blossom comes too early to sing,
And the lazy flutter of
Apple blossom dawdles
Over the fecund belly of a brazen spring,
The hem of hand –me –downs catching mud
I heard Mother Blackbird singing high,
There are too many roads,
All older than I
And the narrow path trodden over the fields
Was over before I knew
It had begun;
A stumbled start,
(I can tie my own shoes you know),
Into the empty promise,
Full of the chatter of neglected ghosts,
Sing out my name again
Ask me where I’m going,
Like the breeze-blown petals scattered along the road
Sticking to my sole,
Apple blossom comes too late,
Cherry blossom a ticker tape
Parade of soft coloured rain,
I thought I’d know when I got there.

Naught to You.

Naught to zero in
The span of a hand,
Where did you go?
You found religion
And I found the Devil’s
In the details,
Called to witness
Our inevitable ascension,
I loved you best
When you remembered
The spells we cast off
Into the bloodied night of
A childhood’s end,
Would you shed such again
For me, would I for you?
Blood and tears tear
Us together, apart;
We bleed for others,
Not for ourselves,
A God gifted fate
Naught to zero,
In the span of our hands.