IN  THE  NORTH

This year I saw a winter quite anew

and watched the darkening days devour the light,

reduce the sky’s palette to sombre hue,

leach crags and dales and walls of modeled life.

Each day another pace towards a dark,

a place of velvet black of deepest mystery, 

a void enclosed within the flakes of bark

the sculptor made which draws me in inexorably.

But we both saw the void the sculptor rimmed.

You see the edge, I see the whole within. 

The rim which contrasts faintest hints of green,

which gives us hope beyond our dream.

We too are more than each upon our own,

so together see both dark and rising dawn.

Andy Goldsworthy’s work at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park,December 2007.

Reading

In the gap between an English afternoon and evening,

we're let into the bookshop, leaving the dishevelled city

with its relentless pavements for the civilisation

of folding pine chairs and carpeting; books.

She enters to held breaths wall-to-wall. She's slight, tanned,

more this, less that than anyone expected, hair bright as a globe.

She shows slides: cooking monkey in Gambo, on a pirogue

up the Zaire river, getting stoned by children in Senegal.

But my eyes are on her more than the pictures. She brings me

the world on her feet, skin, breasts, in my own tongue.

It silences me, an islander holidaying on other islands;

Ibiza, Crete, Tenerife. A woman walking continents raises dust.

Willing to see more sense in a grain of desert sand

than in all of England, I queue for her book, her signature.

Meeting her eyes, I receive my blessing and leave smiling.

We all do. We have been saved: already we are less ordinary.

Mandy Sutter

Mandy's new novel, Stretching It, a light-hearted look at love, papier-mache and caring for an impossible parent, is available at Amazon UK

At least

At least, he said
you'll get a poem out of this.
Yeah, I thought:
a short one.

Mandy Sutter

Les Nymphéas – Tree Reflections

Les Nymphéas – Tree Reflections

 

He sits in a wicker chair, gazing at trees,

straw hat, old suit, patrician beard,

cigarette held in limp fingers: Claude Monet.

Our cessation is not sudden. Like stars

across the black dome of a sky, one by one,

flickering, unnoticed, into oblivion,

senses lose their clarity. Seeing is all,

the sensual beauty of being. Dying eyes

blur what memory tells, what paint recalls.      

Giverny, when daylight and darkness

share a moment of equilibrium;

lake mirrors last hints of brightness

in the imagined sky. Shadow of willow,

trunk and whispy branches, shimmer

against blues of echoed, vanishing light.

Yet rose pink, palest white, green, luminous,

lilies, floating spirits, gently drift

across the blackness, suspended,

forever, against impending night.

Rain on a carriage window

Rain on a carriage window

The train has stopped.  Beyond a barrier of glass

grey fields; by the track a broken fence,

ditch, reeds, dark scrub of bramble.

Towards the horizon tall trees, wires, towers,

denote a nameless town.

We wait, watching the droplets of rain,

tadpoles of light, that sliver, quiver,

coalesce, then slip to oblivion.

Somewhere at the front of this train, a locomotive

hisses or growls, awaiting a signal

for the main line, or maybe the branch

- we are no longer sure.

Time is here suspended. Our way defined

by tracks untravelled, a route unknown.

Only raindrops, quick, elusive as thought,

gently tease at memory.

Dune Fox

DUNE FOX

High dunes, reed-spiked, hush surf’s roar.

Wind whipped, we stop, dismount,

leave bikes by the Fietspad.  She is there,

small, sharp-eared, rust brown. Eyes meet;

Hers dark pools. She pauses, pleads, pads to where

We rustle for biscuit.  She eats, quick, as if to say

Is it not better so to busk than tear

The guts from a quivering, wide-eyed prey?

She plays an old game. Wolves, wild dogs, gave up

savage freedoms for table scraps, stale meat,

their masters’ whistle and crack of whip.

obsequies of obligation, perfectly met.

Fox in the blowing sand, we also come,

word-tamed to beg a stranger’s crumb.

 The title poem of Colin Speakman's 2011 collection - available on Amazon £3 or order direct from

colinspeakman.tfl@blueyonder.co.uk - state address and invoice will be included (post free)