A few words for a cold Sunday morning. Poetry is in the rhythm as it is in the wind, in the coalescence or energies that keep the world warm and alive on this frosty morning. The silence of meditation, the white canvas across the land. On days such as these we search for warmth. We wrap up well in our coats or lie longer in bed under the covers. But whether at home or out and about, what we seek is human warmth, a smile, a hand held, a kiss, the clench of love, anything to remind us that this too will pass, that the cold season will shift into spring and on into summer and that patience will get us through these challenging times.

Poetry is in the steps that words take, how they move through the mind at a trot, or flow smoothly like a river or rush over a wintry weir, driven always by the passion for life and by the sustaining energies that come directly from the sun. November. The month of remembrance and of memory, of those who are in the cold cold ground, of those who move warmly above it. Memory, the living gallery of moments and places and feelings and faces and sensations and hopes and dreams and love. 

Erith

From Holly Hill to the river’s edge
           a chill November day
with an icy wind
           soughing among the alders
and the damp chrysanthemum petals
           blown about the garden-ways
beneath a low grey sky

Lassitude
           languor,
                      a sluggish tide
slapping the charred beams
           of the abandoned jetty
           the air thick with decay
                      and obsolescence

The future too has its backwaters
           where light will gather in
dark pools of neglect
           who bathes in these waters
may be lost
                      lost forever