chamaeleon

in a sky of change
night is falling
regardless

Palimpsest

Living on a surface
scraped clean by time,
the geology of generations,
the faint striations of what was
once perfected and worn away
to nuance and supposition;
not one scratch, a truth,
an approximation
of the silence
of a ghost.

Tea

tea
and sympathy
never enough to forestall
the crumbling remains
of yesterday

Droplet

Falling, in the bleak rain,
this uncertain weather,
under a barometer of sky
where altitude pressures air
where clouds in turmoil
twist fog around the sun,
an arc as fluid as time’s days,
time’s years as rounded
as the planet’s shoulder,
the empty horizon a shrug,
disquiet and disinterest
hunched beneath it.

Bodger

I never was a joiner;

I hacked my way ahead
in a mockery of carpentry
time running out,
my repairs merely running;

forest fire

             a rainforest burns
        and rain no longer falls
a broad sweep of machinery screams
        its half-track creak cries out ‘timber’
    jibes jibs at trees older than breathing
                it lurches and dives
                      a predatory steel bird
                  spawn of dinosaurs
                      a descendant lizard
          extinction in every rusted scoop

tides

more water
in the dark-channeled sea
as the tide-race shifts
parallel to the shore

the flood’s convergence
clasps the beach-head
scours its precious stone
tearing it like an appetite

and in the ebb
everything is laid bare
laid drenched and dead

mudflats
kelp beds wrack fronds
seaweed limp with exhaustion
and water’s absence
passive and patient
for change

more water
drains from hidden places
while blue sky
slack in the shallows
darkens the gullies
where sea must return

more water
swells low to high

more water
under gravity
and the pull of moon
or sun
or the drag of bedrock

all the inertias of earth
in waves of change
perpetual
in their rising
and their falling
repeat these hours until
tomorrow’s new sea runs
and brings its reckoning
its wet accounting
its tides

© BH, 2019

---

I read a book about tides on my own very special Scottish island (where tides are important): Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth by Hugh Aldersley-Williams. Very informative. Made me think about the volumes of water heaving across the surface of the planet, We have, at most 5 metres, here. Elsewhere, anything goes; influenced by seabed topography, oceanic currents, landmass… And not even as regular as we think. Still, regular enough for me, its rise and fall organises life there - shopping, visits to the pub, scrabbling visits to the foreshore. 

Rising ever higher and scouring the margins of ground never before reached, I wonder at its relentlessness. More water, that's for sure. How could anyone deny it?

world

Political Weather

We think we see which way the wind blows -

whirl

tomorrow
money will rain
on the dispossessed…

after the rich
are awash with it
a trickle will come down
from the favoured
to the rest…

volatiles

this room
this office room
where droplets in the air condense
like vague ideas and run down walls
where obedience and protocol perspire
vaporous guilt complicit mist settling
on the hard-worked bent-headed
lower orders desk-bound slaves
breathing for want of anything
else to do

turtle

the turtle swims among debris
in a deep and poisonous murky sea
and it’s so unfortunate that the turtle
turns out like humans to be mortal

First the Sharpened Blade

First,
the sharpened blade
cuts fallow ground
to wounded smoothness.

this morning

this morning
I saw the sun filtered through trees
in the hour before its light touched
the white walls of my house

watercolour

sky is water

cold inside me
shivering speech
nature’s idioms
chill and muttering
in my blood

precipitations

rain falls
threaded from heaven
a heavy mist on the eyes
rough ropes binding sky
to a promise of weather
no climate can keep

syncope

a rush of blood
from the head
faint-hearted, limp-limbed
more like dead

narrative

there is
a narrative in rock
erosions of history in lines
striated faces at the wild world’s edge
lines seldom spoken
not a word for
anything
alive

not cloud

not cloud

but a heaven of suns

where 

rise or set

some saint walked

some fiddle-player stroked

bow over string

a bright hollow melody

turned the blue of sky

white with vapour

on a reel of heaven

a dance of sunrise

an air of air

© BH, 2019

---

Duncan Chisholm, the fiddle player, posted a sky over Galicia (with hashtag #SantiagoDe Compostella). I thought about skies, fiddle-players and saints walking. I wrote this in reply.

days to come

days to come
you will find out how
today’s days and minutes
laid the odds for our future

Slugabed Binion

Slugabed Binion from her bed by a brown-stained dresser wakes to morning. Wisps of dream still trickle from her teardrop eyes. Her thin, fair hair hides its grey in the time it takes to comb and comb, to brush away the truth. It falls in hatched straight lines and masks her silver with its gold. She sighs and puts a white hand to her face, the pale lip trembles in a memory till the red stick paints today across the edges of her smile.

Ozymandias Recycled

A traveller 

mocked a king,
beside the sand
round which cold passions
command decay
and said,

‘Frown away,
sneer, half despair,
look on the desert sands,
sunk and level;
bare the lip,
read these lifeless words
far from those stone remains
that met the wreck of things.

almost gothic

seaward dusk

a woman
hair spun black
as midnight

Faces

Faces,
white as cumulus,
people the clouds;
expressions drift
with the weather;
a dark nimbus
shadows their eyes.

chamaenerion

fenced
plantation woods
bracken banks and
chamaenerion
rising into
summer

in search of…

someone went in search of
   God
in the lines of a book
   between cracks in creation

crocodile frack

Country rock weeps through fractured veins

deep in the mantle and, still, nobody gains, 

except those whose need for treasure

is no natural force: liquid under pressure,

breaking surface like a sweat of fear….

Nothing, but nothing, to be seen here…

back-en

throu the fog a bou-hocht carl an his bull
gang slow in the back-en dag ‘at haps
the sair-aff black-affrontit cottar-touns

an gangin doon the orraman sings
a luv-sang o illtricket luv
‘at spiks o a ring an the hairt it braks

och, the year’s back has struck the simmer deid
an the haar rowes up but twa grim shaddas passin

From ‘Automne' (1913) by Guillaume Apollinaire. after a translation into Scots by Paul Malgrati – see over

© BH, 2019

---

Paul Malgrati offered a translation into Scots of the above. I couldn’t resist an attempt at translation. Like before, the result is different again. That’s the way with language, minds and poetic form in general.

I got the thumbs up on it from Paul, so all’s well. Plenty room for expression.

You can read Paul’s original (and Apollinaire’s)  here…

Last on Poetry24

I had nineteen poems published by Martin at Poetry24 in 2018. Nine more  in 2019 — the latest, and last (because Poetry24 is closing for submissions) is: I read the news today. It was also the last submission Martin at Poetry24 put up. I'm honoured.

I read the news today - news and news and news… the news never sleeps

I read the news today

"…the whole world weeps, sheds water from its fractured veins, 
finds its bedrock shattered or under pressure, under duress, 
it oozes blood, a blood-like fluid, a thin extraction, 
the Earth’s crust sobbing, mortally wounded by stabs of greed"

amygdalin

bitter
almonds
on the tongue
poison

Brandit

The names for far we bade, pauchled,
syne they sealed oor mous wi saicrets,
made us sweer an, throu oor ain obedience,
thirlt us tae their schemes.

Bang, Bang

Bang, bang, you’re dead, the children said;
it‘s just a toy, says a boy to the policeman;
but whatever he saw, it was against the law.

yamazakura

above the clouds
warrior rain gathers
and waits to soak winter’s bones
with heaven’s blood falling
on cold hard ground
a life for a life
returned

sakura

clouds of springtime
unfold their petals as vapour
a bloom-like mist on once-bare trees
and the turn of a year passes
its one moment of being
as yet uncommitted
to memory

Poetry24 April

I had nineteen poems published by Martin at Poetry24 in 2018. Eight more so far in 2019 — the latest, published on 18th April, is: not even the captain.

not even the captain - I couldn't keep quiet about Brexit any longer…

not even the captain

"lost souls on a heaving swell where an incidental tide

drags us drifting between land and open sea

not even the captain — going down ship and all"

Love Dare Not

there is no good news
for the rhapsodised
nor for their lovers nor ourselves
who are also artists and buy love
like cheap concrete
cumbersome stone
to build our phantasms with

Doors and Ways

Can’t be room for everyone…

We think…

return to earth

in the place where
blue turns black where
sharp stars stab the night where
haze on the horizon curves where
the planet bends beneath inscrutable heaven

Poetry24 March

I had nineteen poems published by Martin at Poetry24 in 2018. Seven more so far in 2019 — the latest, in March for International Women's Day, is: Invisible Woman.

Invisible Woman - the gender data gap - the world measured by geeks (mostly men)

Invisible Woman

For the Journeyman

The road’s black business runs thick with the hoarseness of tyres,
with the rattle of high-sided vehicles, the lull of household names,
storage, haulage, shopping malls, cheap components, chain-store
halls, white goods, car parts, sofas, beds, special moments, turn out
the light, sleep-well-my-darling, just one more night’s breakneck
hurtling through this two-lane highways’ sun-set drawn-out dusk.

Poetry24 February

I had nineteen poems published by Martin at Poetry24 in 2018. Six more so far in 2019 — the latest, in February, are: Eschaton, priceless love and Underclass. Coming soon (I hope) - jihadi bride.

jihadi bride - grooming, radicalisation - call it what you like…

jihadi bride

Eschaton - part of Poems for the Planet. Doom and gloom and the end of days…

Eschaton

Plinth

Yes, I remember Grantham—
The name and the association—
Because one day in the autumn
Of a year, my train connected.

Shunted on some railway triangle
This way, that way, forwards and back,
Till I ran across bridges to travel
North away from Thatcher’s England.

Sea Change

shore to shore
an ocean rolls its silence up
conceals its secret places

from us

Undying Art

Poetry was never dying:
always alive, it lay sleeping
in doorways, stepped over
by people looking somewhere else.

spark

the truth
has finally dawned
no-one calculated
the cost of the wind
as we should have
building for
tomorrow

JFMAMJJASOND

January cold taxes the purse.
February remembers love for a time
While winter deals its worst.
March gives us reason
For changing the season
As wind blows through like a curse.

Poetry24 2019

I had nineteen poems published by Martin at Poetry24 in 2018. Here's the first of 2019 — Perihelion —  and the second – Artifices of Intelligence on the Poetry24 website. A third – Tanks 1919 – on the 31st January.

Poison in the Stone

poison
in the stone
poison in skeletons
shells and remains

Art Poisons the Artist

shells in shards, shaped like striated musculature
she carved them from the flesh of beaches
with husked sand, carapaces and skull segments
tied and strung into Adam’s bones
with the dust of grinding suspended in the air
and chipped flakes of cartilage silting her worktops
she breathed life into her work while particulates
drained her own life to an ebb like a quicksand

Assumption

fate
is a product of the sky
on some distant black night
in which we squint at the stars
and follow them sunwise
to planetfall