in the sun watching
the sky – lying on my back
the world rotates
It is five-am, with little light,
some would say the sky is dark:
before the chorus of the dawn
no birdsong yet – do hark!
But look again, just out there,
where trees all silhouetted stand,
proudly jutting from the earth,
into the night-sky fanned:
an array of branches reaching out
into the darkness – pray!
Is it not for catching moon-beams
that the leaves, all angled, stay?
How can the leaves have silhouettes,
unless the sky is bright,
with the faintly glowing silvery,
constellations of star-light?
Is it that we just don’t notice,
or do we choose that we don’t see,
that softly glowing, heaven’s light,
comes shine – or do we sleep-
walk through each day where ,
so many sights be seen,
that for the simplest beauty, then,
our eyes no longer keen!
So seize upon the silence,
but seize by letting go,
and see that all around you,
is a soft, celestial glow!
I shall be here – in the shadows,
upon a dune-crest riding high,
playing my whistle, softly, sadly:
oh – let the tide come flooding nigh. Continue reading
Poems like fishes all come swimming past –
so many, innumerable, all going so fast:
I’d like to try catch-one but shoaling they fin
into a whirling ball, silver, all wild in a spin!
In a blur they wheel past me and gone in a flash –
in the silent, still water – not even a splash,
but in the comforting clarity, enveloping fold,
of the crystal clear water its not even cold.
So floating I drift with the tides and the lace
of intricate seaweeds, across oceans I chase:
below fantastical chandeliers, by the sun lit –
the tentacled colonies of jelly fish – I flit.
In the depths a rare shadow: of hope a faint glimmer
in the distance before me – spy a brilliant shimmer!
One day shall I catch one, one day to be sure
will I land my fine catch upon a far golden shore.
Oh the Marram Grass so firm before
the violent waves that raise-crash ashore
and carve in the sand a delicate rose
of the coming of the wind – and how it goes
and scratches just like a seismograph
a record of just how the wind gusts laugh
and leap between blades shimmering
and play, reverberating, glimmering.
Oh what a charge to nurture flowers gay
and spread in the sun day after day
and night after night below the milky stars
send pale racimes out-reaching far
towards the sea that ashore angry foams
and the rising sun’s warming golden gloam.