While life was somewhere else

KODAK Digital Still Camera
After the fall

If I go I won’t tell you

I’ll just disappear one day.

Like when a cigarette ,which seemed so long,

suddenly has become smaller

and you never noticed it

because you were talking

about the meaning of life

while life was somewhere else

blown away with your smoke

into the sky

and then dispersed

never quite visible again

but still floating on the breeze

hoping to be caught

in a butterfly net

but unable to communicate

except by flying.

If I go it will not be today

but it will be an ordinary day

no one will realise

that it’s that day

that the bird flies

from her nest

to go to a new place

only seeing the deserted nest

he realises,

my bird has flown

Love is not love

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the Star to every wandering barque,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Healing medicine

I lie back in  my weather-proofed green chair
To gaze up at the flowering maple tree.
Now, touched by sun,lungs full of scented air
I embrace with joy the  natural beauty I  can see.

Old celandine show brightly by my feet
Neglected currant bushes straggle round the path
There is no birdsong yet a silence sweet
Soothes my heart and quietens my wrath.

For my heart's sore and anguished is my mind
Yet in this little wood I feel deep calm.
My eyes are shadowed and my face is lined.
May this green  space bring me a gentle balm.

For even in depression and deep grief,
The mind makes healing medicine of a leaf.