February And Beyond

Three Poems

Kings Lynn to the Fens: Moon-day*

Only yellow flowers of gorse
and the bizarre wild and abandoned apple tree
still hanging on to its autumn crop
of  amber full moons delight
along the ugly outskirts of Kings Lynn
its warehouses and factories,
long, low grey,
among scrubby grasses
punctuated by ungainly estates.

A long, speed-restricted yawn,
as the A10 leads away through suburbia
interpolated by shorn fields,
then over a vista of gently declining green,
pylons marching away
to rally on horizon's ridge.

Unleashed near Tottenhill we speed our way
past birch-woods, gate-houses and estates,
landscape well screened
by edging trees and windbreaks -
suave conservation of the landed gentry.

Over the river Wissey,
the road sits above fenland,
tall poplars, up-thrust spires afar;
and though there were marches of copses
and oak boundaries edging long field drains,
yet now for miles there is not a hedge in sight.
Expanses stretch from farm to hamlet.
A long dyke hides a river.
A hawk looks avidly,
the only bird in the sky.

White against the dark mud
of a sodden, ploughed field
the odd gull, seeking something...

............................

*Part of the journey from Hunstanton to Cambridge, UK.

...........................

Ready for Off

The cherry tree in blossom nods its splays
outside my bedroom window in the breeze.
Down by its bottle-bole ruffle and play
between damp roots, primped primrose petals, leaves;
otherwise back garden's empty of flowers.
Massed daffodils are waiting for their page
and know the score, count time in days and hours
in spring's long prelude, though a cold wind rage.

A sun breaks through the grey noon's frown, a smile
shakes loose from white shawl, beams then shies away.
She ventures one more foray for the style,
establishing the pattern of the day.

We walk with backpacks: get what we're given,
loaded up with coats should skies be riven.

.......................

 Tiw's Day

Robin, thrush and blackbird singing all
from high chestnut twigs, sun-filling pine, yews,
cock pheasant 'chucking' from over the road,
at me in his accustomed garden.

Down on the shore a magisterial sun
transcendent beams a cloud-curtain display,
silvering a  flat sea with mirrored mood,
and lighting up sandbanks of Lincolnshire,
a brilliant metal bar, a sword on edge.

And from white windmills quite unreachable
by Don Quixote, geese in many slow
mutating lines, signing their stately flight
fly all the way by us inland, sandwiched
with sandwiches upon a rock.
                                                    Gulls laugh
at us and life and death and time,
monogamous, billing and squabbling
in their colony, familiarly.

Curlews cry violet embroidery
of long stitched samplers left to fade to grey.

As we pack to go, late sun lights up four
stone heads in the cliff, giant genii,
glowering as any on Mount Rushmore.

Clouds of big midges dancing, chorusing
sunset on high by yew and pine - assign
a ceremonial squadron over parking car.

Now late the songbirds sing into the dusk
already sorting out territories,
stirring me again, that lode, that geode
gemstones shattering through air in shining
fragments.
                     I stand and look at blue, tattered
between cloud-skin rents. A world without you.
I hear the blackbirds quarrel into night
and then the owl renewing her deep trysts.

...............................