In times of emergency

It’s our duty to be attentive :
           the same consciousness
that sets us apart
           brings us together
not just in times
           of collective emergency
but as we admire a fair rose
           or gaze into a pair of pale
green or blue or hazel eyes
           and whisper words of love

And in the summer lie
           beneath the mighty oak
and know that its leaves
           will one day fall and yet
not give a damn
           because love is all
and while away the hours
           wondering wistfully
where the universe would be
           without us

John Lyons

Peonies

Think pink thrill
of the peonies
their curvaceous
double bloom
their petalled layers
of fragrant frills
skirting a deeper
fertile mystery

John Lyons

Against decadent decay

A world put under the mind’s scalpel
that world within a world
of words and nouns and verbs
a poetry of things that co-opts them
into the world of thought and feeling

Who salutes the morning dew
or pays homage to the heroic harvest
or sings of time’s magnificence
and all that filters through it
who sets the frailty of rosebuds
against the strength of love
Whose naming encompasses
the sun and the moon and the stars
or traps the compelling beauty
of the cosmos in order to investigate
the vast poetics of space
with all its untold relativities
so that no thing remains dumb
or inanimate or is abandoned
to the decaying decadence of defeat ?

John Lyons