Poem

Bats – poem

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Twenty thousand pounds of insects in flight
This balmy evening, their final night.
Condemned mosquitoes dart and fly,
Tonight, is your night to die.
Your doom, the Mexican free-tail bats
Hungry to feed on you, and gnats.

Under Austin’s Congress Bridge they hang,
Preparing to catch you with open fang.
The hungry bats are two million strong,
As they, quiet, wait for a sonar gong.
Their suckling pups, they leave alone,
‘Til, parents, fed, come flying home.

The lazy sun dips to the west.
We humans, struggle for a view that’s best.
Dark waters lap on Town Lake’s shore.
We talk softly, nothing more.
We came to watch them fly away,
As they do this, and every summer day.

The cloud emerges like a whirlwind rising,
Darting, flitting, flapping, diving.
No traffic control or rules on the go,
They move fast, they are not slow.
We wonder at their extreme precision
And marvel that there’s no collision.

Tiny forms blend into night sky,
Departing, with ne’er a goodbye.
Away from the watchers into the night,
They make their way on this feeding flight.
We drive home full of awe
Marveling, at what we saw.

Time honored memories – a poem

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A couple of years ago Dan and I studied Eliot’s “The Four Quartets”. I emerged with a sense of wonder at his genius, even if normal persons, such as I, have a hard time comprehending his innuendo and references. He often focuses on time which inspired me to wait a while and then to put my thoughts on the same topic into a poem. I hope that it also gets you thinking.

Time present does not exist.
In the blink of a nano second,
It slips through the veil of now,
To be lost in the past.
In its passage it leaves
No tag, no taste, no touch,
No smell, no color, no light,
Nothing, except perchance, a memory.

The future we live,
And relive. Plan and seek,
It does not exist. It is
A figment of our expectation
To lurk forever undefined
It fills us with hopes, fears, excitement,
Anticipation, but no regrets for
Regrets are the stamp of the past

The past is select iotas of time.
To live, and relive. A few moments,
Kept in our temporal minds.
Not held for eternity,
Fleetingly resurfacing in our present,
Here lurk our regrets and sorrows
Mingled with joys and pleasures,
All lost, perhaps, when we die.

Some past chose us
Lee Harvey Oswald kills JFK
And the world acquires a memory
That individual moment when the shots rang
Yuri Gagarin, man in Space, whirls weightless,
Man’s “one small step” indelible on
World vision, Neil Armstrong takes his “giant leap”
Planet and moon one in time.

Other remnants of individual past
Horded, nourished, retrieved
Slip, invited, or not,
Into the mind’s present.
A marriage, a trip, a view,
A regrettable mistake,
Chocolate birthday cake
And Proust’s petit Madeleine.

Fifty years ago I selected
An obscure moment
To remember for eternity
Walking an ugly lane
I said “this moment is worthless
And yet, I choose to remember it”
Undistinguished, cherished
Thrust out of that present into the future,

And recall I still do:
The dirty ground, the ruts and stones,
The grey sky, the high hedges, the cold spring air,
My satchel, my isolation,
My knowledge that this moment,
Is a piece of the past,
My unimportant snippet of time,
Only, and always, mine.

I Remember – a poem

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You might enjoy a good laugh today.

The high pile reeked,
Cow manure, good, and rich.
He ordered it to feed the azaleas
I remember her horror as the big
Red dinosaur truck dumped the load
A giant turd on our drive.
The flies arrived with it.

I remember her voice as she yelled
Horror, I remember his cringe, his
Rapid movements as he began to cart
It away, one relentless wheelbarrow
After another, his exhaustion.
I remember the driveway clean
When her dinner guests arrived.

The smell lingered on for days,
Floating on fly-laden air.

Marriage – a poem

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‘The Wind’ by C Dale Young is a haunting poem. In this poem I plagiarize by taking the first line of each stanza of ‘The Wind’ (at times modified slightly) and work it into my own interpretation called ‘Marriage’. I wanted to post a link to C Dale Young’s poem that you could read it but I couldn’t find one, so if any of my readers requests it I’ll post it here. I refrain from doing so now as I don’t want to be compared with a master like C Dale Young.

But I was afraid then. I remember still
menacing water on my face,
my anguish, as I lost my grip on the shore.
Where were you, partner, when I stepped in
alone, to brave the salty deeps,
abandoned, to my frigid fear?

Unlike you I was lit by panic then,
waves sucked me into their embrace,
Could I yell for help?
Many were there immobile, impassive
but you mouthed ‘I love you’.
Then, you told me that

there shall be no fear. But I was afraid.
Yesterday I watched my friend
walk the same path to the vows altar.
I heard her dismayed cry as
her craft swirled on wild waters.
The current spun her fast, she

who has only just learned to be carried by it.
Do not shrug, I need you beside
to brave life’s treacherous eddies
Together we sail swirling seas to eternity.
I need you to buoy me up,
To save me; you, who keep my heart

in your rooms. Now, the old man says
we must face life together,
what God joined no man shall
put asunder. The lifeboat of union
needs two at the oars.
You and I together, for a third.

But this, this final step … Do not laugh.
when a child joins us in the
waxing and waning of life. We are bound,
watertight, as a deft dry family
rowing serenely over the expanse,
hereafter, to never dive alone.

Rip Underwood’s Poems

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Today I post some poems written by my friend RIP UNDERWOOD. We are in the same book club and writers’ group. Rip always has a gem to share but is very modest and so I thought that it would be good to air some of his work. He sent me three, what he calls ‘light things’. I hope that you enjoy them. He doesn’t often give his poems titles and so I have named them by his file names – perhaps you can assist with name suggestions. My favorite is ‘Inner Critic’!

Inner Critic

When I wake, he’s awake
my inner critic
next to me under a pile
of bedclothes, clutching
the TV remote.

Sometimes, first thing,
I’ll say boo to him, loud,
and jump out of bed.
Sometimes I’ll stay right there
and tell him a story

of when the fireman had to come
or the baby fell from a promontory
because of something someone did
ignoring their inner critic.
It makes him feel important

and sleepy. I’ll slip away
and it will take a few minutes
before he pads through the hall
rattling the doorknobs
looking to remind me

that after a commercial break
that thing I did at the blackboard
when I was twelve years old
will be rerun for the zillionth time
on channel four.

Rip Underwood 2013

Bees

Punch cup picnic bee, go away!
Find some other buffet.
The salvias have bloomed, the coneflowers thrive,
so much closer to your hive…

Are we pretty to you?
Have we a pleasant hue?
Perhaps it is our smell:
O darting pest, I cannot tell.

Ah! There she goes: where were we –
I’ve bread, a jug, and thee –
yet, O! she comes again, and O!
she’s brought a friend…!

Rip Underwood 2013

Morpho

The Latin tropics hiker
jealous lepidopterist
wishes he’d been first
to put that frail morpho

under optics, to magnify
the needle serrates
in its stitch-row wings; first
to see the scalloped sunlight

skittering away; cubed, brighter
in blue than any dye.
He’d have said
in that best and simple time

Look here; look how God
makes His miracles, casts
them out over the winds,
on tiny magnetic currents!

Rip Underwood 2013

My Grandfather Clock – a poem

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MY GRANDFATHER CLOCK

My grandfather’s grandfather clock,
Thirty decades of tick tock, tick tock,
He and I together for fifty years,
A separation would bring me tears.
Pulsating heart regular going,
Brass pendulum to-ing and fro-ing.

Three hundred and sixty beats of time,
Then for the hour, a sliver chime.
Seven feet of walnut veneer case
Seraphs carved onto his shiny face.
His slender minute and hour hands,
Pointing precise their indexing wands.

In Queen Anne’s reign he had his birth,
That’s when he began to show his worth.
Maker Bradley sired his sib at St Paul’s,
But my clock did his work in men’s halls.
Moon faces revolve to tell the tide,
Fording the Thames, such a useful guide.

Weekly I open his glass case,
To push a key into his face.
Gentle, gentle I am kind,
Yet he sobs and sighs as I wind.
I check to see nothing is wrong
Life blood of families here and gone

As I pass by him, my hand I glide,
To wistful, touch his sleek glowing side.
Glance at his face, the time to tell,
Confirming moments I know so well.
Alone, a child I’d quietly lie,
And count when the long hours pass’d by

He is not a recorder or judge
He keeps no inventory or grudge
Time pulsating by in clicks and gongs
Time akin to the beat of men’s songs
Time paced towards death, an end for me
I hope he ticks on for eternity.

Approachable – a poem

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This poem was inspired by the line ‘I never could talk to you’ from the fifth stanza of Sylvia Plath’s Daddy. Something which Coco J. Ginger http://courtingmadness.wordpress.com/ wrote in her blog inspired me to respond with it and so I thought that I should also post it on my blog.

I never could talk to you
You, so powerful, strong,
You with your success,
Your good looks,
Your charm

And I,
Who was I?
I was the nothing at your feet,
An insignificant nobody,
I never could talk to you

Until one day you slipped
I saw you fall, on your face,
Then, when you fell,
From grace,
I could talk to you.

The Miracle of the Lily – a poem

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DSC00116

This year my amaryllises are early. Each year their loveliness astonishes me and I wonder how so much beauty can come out of a simple bulb which looks like a large union. I have many varieties but the first bloom is always a traditional common single-headed flower as I photographed this morning.

Mix together dirt,
Water, fresh air,
One fist-sized bulb
And bathe in sunlight.
No scientist can replicate
This simple formula.

Result, a fat green shoot,
Miraculously rising.
Eureka, it bursts open,
Heads of Amaryllis color.
Four exquisite blooms,
Delicate membranes shimmer.

This lily a tiny thread
Of the globe’s fabric
Glory to surpass Solomon.
In it, the pure hand of creation,
As it is a million times a second,
Everywhere on our beautiful earth.

The Image – a poem

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IMAGE

This is a poem which I wrote some time ago. Last week I plagiarized it to use it to answer Eric Alagan’s challenge for a 55 word piece on portrait which he posted on Written Words Never Die http://ericalagan.net/ This being so I thought that I ought to post the whole poem here.

An image random found
In the city’s anonymous crowd
Is held before my outstretched person,
As precious as a famous portrait,
As fresh as a saint in fresco.
A face in the rushing crowd,
Suddenly, to transcend the media,
Being to me a window
Opening to you beyond.
So the face hoarded, valued,
As a great master’s painting,
Timeless, space-less, beautiful,
Is hung in the galleries of my mind.

Immutable – A poem by L.E. M. Chaundler

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This is another of mother’s poems. It is probably circa 1935 pre WWII, and is, perhaps, inspired by Wordsworth.

You’re the loveliest thing I shall ever find,
Ploughed field on a hill with the sky behind.
Secretly smiling in the winter sun,
And knowing with serene expectancy
The finished cycle once again begun
Enfolding safe the year’s new infancy.
A thousand thousand turning years have rolled
Their seasons on your ageless placid face,
Emperors and Kings in purple pomp and gold
Have waxed and waned, faded and left no trace.
But you are the same on the brow of the hill,
Living and living, calm, ceaseless and still.
Unheeding the restless weary beat
Of countless futile pounding feet,
Leaving behind for all their toil,
Not even footprints in your soil.