u

m

b

i

hollowed vessels
conduct the oceans
blood is made of
to salt-grained history

© BH, 2025

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No 6 in the series - still working backward.

I might even try to explain…

l

i

c

u

s

so few words

fist

I drew her face

I drew her a face

where invented beauty

washed over nerves and veins
and painted melancholy in her eyes
as if some memory survived
her fruitless dreaming

Iteration

Surfaces decided that my eyes
could never see enough, could not take in
how the light falls and lies
nor see the patterns that light was making.

Poetry24 - Last for a While

I've had sixteen poems published by Martin at Poetry24 since January this year. It's now in recess. Here's Tick Tock till, hopefully, the New Year :

Here are those from July to September

Tick Tock - one final call to avoid climate catastrophe….

Tick Tock

When at last… my big mouth…

when at last you were able
to paint heaven
black and vast with clustered stars
like fingerprints
you drew a faint line in sea foam
across your horizons and your tides

between

in an arc of light
a segment
heaven meets the sea

sea washes
the feet of continents
and narrow human ground

and in the space
between heaven and earth
the emptiness of air

reflects blue above
and the blue of ocean
the colour of weather

while everything alive
circles in the curved
brushstroke of creation

© BH, 2018

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Alison Dunlop posted her latest large-form watercolour between heaven and earth (on TH Saunders Waterford Series archival cotton paper, 101 X 153 cm) destined for the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour Open, in Edinburgh (in November 2018).

As ever, it captures the sea and island-scapes of the Minch and the Inner Sound between Skye and the mainland.

I had to make a short poem on it…See Alison's website for more… The RSW is here…

Of the Art

[Meeting Minute 0609]

Is this our art,
Crossed conversations,
Connection, a fluid thing,
A tenuous shifting?

The Time Has Come…

[Meeting Minute 1207]

The time has come the old men said
To talk of many things
Of late breakfasts, and of soup de jour,
The joy that luncheon brings.

Inaugural

[Meeting Minute 2604]

Two members
Inquorate
In conversation
At a corner table

Three or more
Gathered together
A church of a kind
Secular

Seven was the number
And the word was luncheon
And the word was with the servants
Who brought about sustenance
In exchange for coin

Portrait of an Artist

The mirror mirrored
Time’s imprisonment
Pale green walls
One-bulb light

The sound of the decades
Counted tick bloody tock
Days already fading