A Glasshouse - Peter Kenny

A collapsing umbrella,
its tottering frame rotten.
I crunch through a crooked door
on glass chunks like punched out teeth
and trespass in an Eden
of bramble, dock and bracken
serpented by fractured pipes.

I stand here to remember
when workmen’s shadows lengthened
against this whitewashed glass.
But something then disturbs me:
a plane, maybe, or the wind
making a ruined music
among the raddled panes.

Airborne once from Alderney
I glimpsed a summer Guernsey,
cuddled by the setting sun,
with all her glass glistering.
My Sarnia, my Sarnia Cherie,
faceted by industry
like a gemstone in the sea.

Peter Kenny

This poem was first published in A Guernsey Double by Richard Fleming and Peter Kenny. Peter's latest collection is called The Nightwork and is published by The Telltale Press. www.peterkenny.co.uk

Root and Branch - Peter Kenny

Today's poem is a "Golden Oldie" and was originally published here in March 2012

There’s marching in the Guernsey lane,
my table’s bare, the pattern’s clear:
they will starve us after curfew
they will break us at the table.

I scrape aside the hedgerow scraps
to float along the willow road
to distant bomb-pocked England
near a city I've never seen

where my children stay with strangers
and, forgetting all their patois,
they turn in skies of fractured glaze
and trill their songs with English tongues.

Each night the doves return as crows
and I’m harrowed root and branch
as they bayonet their places
and their mother stands accused

for I tore them from their garden
and I knotted them with labels
like a cherry shedding blossom
I dropped them from my stupid limbs.

Peter Kenny

Root and Branch - Peter Kenny

There’s marching in the Guernsey lane,
my table’s bare, the pattern’s clear:
they will starve us after curfew
they will break us at the table.

I scrape aside the hedgerow scraps
to float along the willow road
to distant bomb-pocked England
near a city I've never seen

where my children stay with strangers
and, forgetting all their patois,
they turn in skies of fractured glaze
and trill their songs with English tongues.

Each night the doves return as crows
and I’m harrowed root and branch
as they bayonet their places
and their mother stands accused

for I tore them from their garden
and I knotted them with labels
like a cherry shedding blossom
I dropped them from my stupid limbs.

Peter Kenny