Rough Beast - Richard Fleming

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
W B Yeats
 
Beware. Down in the woods today
the Teddy Bears have gone away
and, in their place, a monstrous beast,
by some foul chance, has been released,
perhaps the beast Yeats wrote about.
It has great antlers and a snout
but walks upright, with slouching gait,
and fiery eyes brimful of hate.
Yeats’ famous poem got it right:
it’s written there in black and white.
Life’s started imitating art.
The centre’s gone.
Things fall apart.

Richard Fleming

Image : "The Thing What Whispers" by Kat Philbin (@stupidanimals)

Beyond the Sea and Sky - Ian Duquemin

I walked the rugged cliff paths from the high land to the sea
With only Mother Nature as my welcomed company
Beneath my feet the fallen leaves lay naked on the ground
I sat and breathed the life of air and relished what I'd found
The only sound is silence, I have found some peace at last
It takes away the troubles of a most pathetic past
I think that I will stay awhile and sing with seagulls high
And wonder what's beyond the joining of the sea and the sky

Ian Duquemin

Image : Pixabay - diego_torres

Summer Magic - Leslie Pinckney Hill (1880-1960)

So many cares to vex the day,
    So many fears to haunt the night,
My heart was all but weaned away
    From every lure of old delight.
Then summer came, announced by June,
    With beauty, miracle and mirth.
She hung aloft the rounding moon,
    She poured her sunshine on the earth,
She drove the sap and broke the bud,
    She set the crimson rose afire.
She stirred again my sullen blood,
    And waked in me a new desire.
Before my cottage door she spread
    The softest carpet nature weaves,
And deftly arched above my head
    A canopy of shady leaves.
Her nights were dreams of jeweled skies,
    Her days were bowers rife with song,
And many a scheme did she devise
    To heal the hurt and soothe the wrong.
For on the hill or in the dell,
    Or where the brook went leaping by
Or where the fields would surge and swell
    With golden wheat or bearded rye,
I felt her heart against my own,
    I breathed the sweetness of her breath,
Till all the cark of time had flown,
    And I was lord of life and death.

Leslie Pinckney Hill


Image : Pixabay - Fotorech

Model Behaviour - Joan Etoile

I’m at ease with nudity
I was an artist’s model in’53!
I’d disrobe without a care
And disport myself upon a chair

In creativity’s name I would undress
I felt no shame at my naked flesh
When I was rendered into paint
It often made the young boys faint

Now I’m old and a bit wrinkly
I’ve been posing for the College of FE
Just like the old days they sketched in awe
Warts and all, just what they saw

So it came as a bit of a surprise
When the thought police arrived
Invoked some archaic obscenity laws
And hid me down a corridor

Joan Etoile


Image : Guernsey Press

A Jelly-Fish - Marianne Moore

Visible, invisible,
A fluctuating charm,
An amber-colored amethyst
Inhabits it; your arm
Approaches, and
It opens and
It closes;
You have meant
To catch it,
And it shrivels;
You abandon
Your intent—
It opens, and it
Closes and you
Reach for it—
The blue
Surrounding it
Grows cloudy, and
It floats away
From you.

Marianne Moore


Image : Pixabay - sarangib

1967 - Lyndon Queripel

What happened to the flowers
You used to wear in your hair
Now you have grey streaks there
What happened to the people
That so long ago it seems
All shared the same dreams
The heaven of nineteen sixty seven
A summer of love and peace
When the young were so strong

Were the days of freedom
Just numbered on charts
A club of only lonely hearts
Tomorrow may never know
But if it was guaranteed
Would the blossoms go to seed
The heaven of ninety sixty seven
For me the music was the key
But things got strange, began to change

There was something in the air
Do you recall before the fall
It just transcended it all
Life was dear and love was free
But without a shadowed doubt
The spirit has been all sold out
The heaven of nineteen sixty seven
A promise of skies to kiss
Words were spoken and then broken.

Lyndon Queripel


Image : Pixabay - keaton

Kosmos - Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Who includes diversity, and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look'd forth from the windows, the eyes, for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing;
Who contains believers and disbelievers - Who is the most majestic lover;
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the aesthetic, or intellectual,
Who, having consider'd the Body, finds all its organs and parts good;
Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body, understands by subtle analogies all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of These States;
Who believes not only in our globe, with its sun and moon, but in other globes, with their suns and moons;
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day, but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

Walt Whitman


Image : Pixabay - LoganArt

Bumble - Tony Gardner

Bumble on  the  Bramble blossom.
Busy, buzzing, bumbling  Bee
Blackbird  fluting from  the  branches
Leads  the pastoral  symphony.
Breezes  brush  their  baby  kisses
On  my  skin  to  pure  delight
And  the  summer  sun  is  warming
All  in  this  sweet  world  is  right.
Dancing  in  and  out  of  memories
Like  the  sunbeams  through  the  trees
From  the  long,  hard  years  I've  weathered
Scenes  return  to  sting  or  tease
Running  barefoot  on  the  shingle
Down  towards  that  crystal  sea
Still  I  taste  the  salty  water
Through  the  years  of  history.
Bumble  on  the  Bramble  blossom
Busy,  buzzing,  bumbling  bee
Taking  me  to  where,  I  wonder
Are  you  happier  than me ?

Tony Gardner


Image : Pixabay - Emphyrio

The Great Man - Stephen A. Roberts

We sit and wait in hushed reverence
as the great man - with hair like mine, and C&A clothes - 
arose
The Laureate.
The priest of prose. 
He spoke in quiet Yorkshire tones
of his joy of working with girls and boys
and like a visiting stand-up cracked 
that he found here weird 
and could not pronounce Aurigny 
OR-EEEE-KNEE we all mouthed. 

Then he read from selected works
with an emphasis on the coast
a place for him exotic as the moon
he told us of his penniless Pennine walks
where he would literally
earn a crust living on his words:
those words arranged like the blocks
of the dry stone walls
in his native land, solidly built
with meaningful gaps between
inspiration for an installation -
the plaques inscribed with his
works - his Stanza Stones.

Then questions from the audience
who by then were almost mute
afraid to look the fool
before the ruler of rhyme
in his casual wear
I too was silent - what could I have asked - 
how was Lockdown? - we all knew - 
he spent it in his shed with the famous 
and a TV crew
despite his self- effacing air he is
quietly industrious with massive self belief
likes Bowie and OMD and
is a wannabe rock star just like me:
but the gulf between he and I
is as ‘twixt land and sky.

Stephen A. Roberts


Image : Stephen A. Roberts