It seems a while since there was any actual poetry on this blog, so it’s time to redress the balance. As I’m working my way through Patrick Whitefield’s “The Living Landscape”, I’ve begun to write a sequence of poems about my home territory. Here are bits of the newer ones, still in draft form.
(from)The Territory of Rain
This is the territory of rain.
It is king here, more than cold or wind,
and all living is by negotiation
with flows and falls of water.
Earth and sky are heavy with it.
Peat grips it like a miser’s fist.
River runs muddy as it sloughs
the silt from bank and hillside.
It winks between grass stems,
silvers pot-holes in the tarmac,
attacks roofs with soft persistence,
slips between slate and timber.
(from) Grounded
In the gardens the soil is deep, dark and full
of broken china, rubble of half-bricks, the bony
broken bowls of clay pipes. As I dig the kitchen bed,
seeds from other gardeners, poppy, columbine,
marigold and wild pansy, come to light, and flower
rowdily among the onions. Neither first here
nor last, I leave seeds too – borage, nasturtium
blue-flowered alkanet. They’ll never be rid of me –
I’ll be here, recidivist gardener, grounded on earth.
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