Three of these poems, are short, poem-sketches of moments in time. Brief, lyrical, imagist observations about people and places. The fourth, is an attempt to address wider world events, the drum of bad news, war and death, which, much as I wish I could blithely ignore, I find I cannot. It isn’t pretty in the way the others might be, so if you don’t like that kind of thing, stop at number three.

Calling home

A sunbeam lasered through 
the hall, bleaching out 
the mirror. For a second, 
until shadows from a passing 
van, restored my face, 
I looked like you.
A reminder. One day you
will disappear. Leaving a 
you-shaped ache, I cannot fill.

A wild mouth

Flesh molehill, rising in stop motion –
those feral lips, when they push into a moue.
Thought as pout. Not sulky, but intense.
Held in suspense, no interested witness
can ever quite be sure what creature will emerge
blinking, in the form of smile or word, or tongue. 

One June day by Vicar’s Brook

Every verge a festival of wrens and 
giddy dragonflies. Sole dissenter, beneath 
the thin-scraped, butter flicker of projected 
morning light – a baleful, cast-off bike. 
Yelling silent warnings about the cage of time. 
Smothered in a swelling stand of bramble. 
To walk on and never stop, seemed, for one
cloud free minute, the only course to take.

The attention economy

This morning, I saw the birdhouse door 
as a bullet hole in a small child’s head.
That’s why some days, news must be blocked out. 
Else Sudan invades the space of blue tits, 
while they gather up material for this year’s nest. 
Might easily have been Gaza, or Ukraine.
It’s early march, nest-building’s underway.
Yellow flowers are being plucked 
from the seasonal triumph of forsythia;
soft buds nipped from rowan, lichen teased 
off the hawthorn – twigs and other useful matter 
are gifted by the ash. Such industry, I can’t help
but find delightful. And yet, over the hedge, 
people are busy starving other people out, 
moving targets on, firing on civilians, 
inside so-called safe-zones. As cold stats alone, 
the sheer numbers are way past comprehension. 
Let alone the blood, the lives, the flesh. 
A mother returning from emptied shops to find 
her family under rubble. I admire small birds,
elsewhere, there’s rape, limbs blown off, 
shared futures wrenched apart. Town and country 
generals, dispatching hell out of Khartoum have made
14 million children dispossessed. And horror keeps 
expanding, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. 
Yesterday, the radio was on, while I stood at the sink, 
hands dipped in lukewarm water, numb. Outside I saw 
two long-tailed tits, trailed by blackcap, dunnock and 
a pair of robins, all intent on building. But someone 
else’s inept hands, may have doctored a photo 
and apparently the economy is turning. 
For some of us at least, craters and gaping mouths 
are not all we have to picture.