DIVERSE POEMS

TRAVEL

Oh marvellous travellers, tell us what you have seen:

The windy legates, driven by impossible seas

Into shore, the long mesdames shifting

Imperceptibly in the windows above the square.

Perhaps your memories will reveal our own mysteries

Above the law, above longing and fortitude,

Mysteries that engage harbours and landscapes

In war and desultory longing.

Soon all travel will be lost or over and

Like the albatross with wings dragging on the deck

Of blunt, vapid ships travellers will

Rouse laughter and unkind tales.

One day, when the world is no longer a mystery

And the kingdom of plants rises to its throne

There will be laughter rather than slaughter

And horses will lift their noble brows and come home.

WHO YOU ARE

 Why are you my star? I wonder this sometimes

Not because I wish to investigate you, for

You are beyond investigation, but because

My thoughts drift to portraits of ordinary people

And I cannot see you in those grim, taut faces.

Unphotographable, you

Whisper across the space that separates

Fact from conjecture. I barely

See your green ship of hidden courage

Beneath the smile, the sparkling eye and outstretched hand -

Really I am your blind, invisible familiar

And I live knowingly in your strange land.

THE LIFE FORCE

Strawberries, cherries and an angel’s kiss in spring

Twice times murky, muddy thick stuff

Totally bogged down.

OK I get it - I have to clone something real

An animal, insect, bird, bat

Or plant kingdom. Won’t happen.

After the dinosaurs

And before humans

Its roots would cure the bite of a mad dog,

This rose.

Solid, shapely, you are like a symbol of a bird

An icon, not a feathered fleshy thing

So beautiful, but everywhere

You are beauty right across

My geography, bird.

But what we have to discuss

Is the ant. Till now we’ve not had time

Maybe ants aren’t worth discussion.

But here they are

Performing their life hack on us

Just beyond the perimeter of care.

The cyclone chewed through you, grove.

Big parts of you became stick

And we quickly partitioned those to wood

Something that a living, loving tree is not.

Nests flew from you, limbs cracked and fell

Your force transferred.

In this grove we wait for life to creep from storm

Through tree to our sick frame, our dumb hope for more.

I want to talk about

My love hate relationship with kikuyu.

But it screams and we can’t make ourselves heard

Man, it loves life.

Lizards, hydra and some other things

Grow back like them, that stolon generation.

Kikuyu always makes a comeback, hoki mai

The sequel positively

Nietzschean. So smart of it.

Free range chickens qualify

As mauri

Expressing its force through chancey hen poise

Their proud perspective on the world, free from

Discussion, not bogged down in facts

Interested, leaning in, communicating with the tongue

But staring at response because we get to run

The door, the water, meal and realm.

Eggs, however, are beyond our expertise.

The life force works in wondrous ways.

ADAM AND EVE

Adam and Eve did not occupy a steady state

They evolved, we see Eve grow right there in Genesis

So we can’t compare our own full occupying evoluting world

In a way which says we change they don’t

O felix culpa sure, but only if what went before was

A painted scene or tableau tapestry, but not

An ecosystem (say) or a planet, something that burns through time

And also not the same to our different.