Gaia

Glance idly and drink the drowsy
lilac’s heady bloom,
or doze a dream beneath the lilting
banana fronds,
appreciate this idyllic time we share
lest these bounteous gifts disappear,
wasted by drugged ambivalence
abandoned with scant promiscuity, then
raped in doubtful ignorance
minutes to millennia flee
into some cosmic rendezvous
none slow or choose to gift a glance as
Gaia sighs and waves goodbye

© Graham Sherwood 03/2010

Mole

A full sky,
so crammed full it may plummet,
pale grey, dense, delivering polar snow.
The paddock in shining cloudscape,
a brilliant white duvet of silence.
The five oaks sleep
beneath a funereal gauze of morning mist,
as the nauseous silence demands my attention.
Then stirring noiselessly, at my feet
dark wet earth,
an eruption of chocolate crumbs,
morsel by morsel, rudely,
blemished brown cake on white icing
upside down.
A moley leather nose
One sniff and he is gone.

© Graham Sherwood 01/10

Tantric

(I was recently advising someone that D H Lawrence was a good source of erotic description. Afterwards it made me remember his poem "snake" and this piece is some sort of hybrid of both it and erotic verse).

Charm me, like a snake
draw me up,
use your hands to hold me there,
firm but wavering,
my intent unclear
in gentle sway, erect
with piercing concentration,
transcendental
one aching tip,
unable to satisfy my basic urge
to spit and strike
into your soft plum flesh.

© Graham Sherwood 2/2010

Twelfth Night

(a particularly dreary day following Christmas 2008. The day seemed worn out and not bothered).


Like a blot set in a subdued grainy haze,
the afternoon’s later sullen moonlight
deems to throw a silver burnish on the remnants
of a day of disappointing gloom.
Through the grimy weather-beaten windowpane.
distant winks from house lights shimmer
in pulsating snowflake shapes.
Higher still, the day’s last cackle of cantankerous rooks,
mute on stamped and trampled leafless, bony roosts.
Below the swirling palls of matted, long dead autumn leaves,
skit from shrub to shrub, as if to hide and seek,
within brittle, lifeless twigs.
A broken terracotta pot lolls to and forth alone,
a seesaw ride, arcing the riven path.
Inside the warming hearth’s aglow,
with breathy, licking flames that fight,
a canon of booming gusts, thrown down the flue,
hissing dissent, within their arsenal of sappy logs.
Tilted, forlorn, undressed, a ravaged yuletide tree,
shivers, discarded and hastily forgotten,
but yet, bathed serenely in this night’s argent beams,
and quiet, presents its own sublime epiphany.

© Graham Sherwood 12/2009

Eleven Eleven

(My stimulation here was the juxtaposition of the relevance of the poppies in today's conflict with that of the past).

Once again we break our men,
those youthful, reckless braveheart souls
who go to war on whose behalf,
surely yours not mine.
Whilst we religious sport poppies
of an altogether different seed
to those beneath our young boys’ tread.
A different flower, a different foe
who do not stand to face our shores
or seek to change our parliament,
but as they fall as petals do
and quietly come home to rest,
another crop kiss mums goodbye
and march away with springing steps.

© Graham Sherwood 11/2009

Departure

(Astonishingly, I composed this a week before my mother died. She had a look of being ready to go somewhere and was exhausted by the preparations for the journey).

So you’ve left me then,
as I knew you would, at night
whilst I was sleeping.
Of course I tried to stay awake,
to wave you off, squeeze your hand,
tell you it would be alright to go.
But I let you down, for the first time
and now it’s too late to make amends.
So,
with just a morbid party to arrange,
that I for one surely do not need,
and they, all thinking that they’ve come
to say goodbye.
But I know you’ve already gone,
even though I missed the final kiss,
and a whispered last farewell.

© Graham Sherwood 10/2009

Forgotten Words

(Looking through some old memorabilia, this fanciful idea took hold).

A creamy, jaundiced, dog-eared envelope
just appeared there, in the bottom of a drawer,
its corners bashed like wrinkled fingers,
the flap unstuck, ajar and begging for an audience.
Words unseen for thirty-seven years,
caught beneath the perfumed liner,
now sadly parched and mottled brown,
but saved, awaiting life’s breath awakening.
The velum crisp and delicate as a baby’s skin,
a whispered crackle sound as tentative fingers,
tease the neatly folded leaf into the light,
succinct, your words in my ear,
I will.

© Graham Sherwood 9/2009