Ah, Dunedin summer days!
At four in the morn the sweet cry of the gull,
The snappy smack of fist on cheekbone as the last revellers chatter and twinkle their way back home,
Backslapping, snappy smacking, gulls crying,
Oh, my Edinburgh days.
Moments
Call yourself a poet
I think –
It’s been said before.
No, I –
Really, it has.
Well, what I’m trying to say –
It won’t be new.
If you’d just let me –
You have to make your voice heard.
I really –
You need to say something new, something never said, and you have to say it out loud.
Well –
Out loud. You need to say it –
I love you.
–
I love you.
–
I said, I love you. And that’s never been said before, not by me to you, not here, not now.
Be quiet. Stop now.
If I lie back on the hot sand and
If I lie back on the hot sand and look at the blank blue sky, there is too much behind the blueness, behind my eyes, for me to make sense of or to write.
I need to walk back across the sand to the shade of the pine trees and pick up a needle or a cone to look at and understand. And then the pattern comes.
I am my past. And an infinity of futures branching away into the possible. My past brought me here, to this shining silver point on which I balance, from which I will stumble on through one, through many, perhaps through all of my futures.
But perhaps I’ll stay lying on the hot sand, under the hot sun, my eyes closed, unable to understand. Perhaps.
I miss you more than words
I miss you more than words, more than music, more than singing.
I miss you more than breathing, more than blood, more than being.
I miss you more than you will ever know, ever dream or ever care.
I miss you now and now forever. I miss you now.
The birdwatcher sings
Regrets? I’ve had a few.
Rug rats? I’ve not had any.
Egrets? I’ve seen a few.
But love? But love?
But love?
Going for Gone
From the sun to the shade
From the shadow to the grave
From the grave to the shade
I follow you.
Who am I?
Remembering
A firework arcs across the night sky of your past, arching, falling, then dampened beneath the sand of your years of life, of experience. And then, then, it sparks into life again, and you are shaking, dazzled, your heart a hammer.
