Category: sonnet

Shall I compare thee to a bird of prey

Shall I compare thee to a bird of prey
Thou art more cruel yet hide it  very well
And if perchance thou now find thou art gay
Meet men now down in the fairy’s glen.

I know not how to paint thy long pale face
The hair so thin, she colour of despair
Thou lookest like a Tudor in disgrace
That once was sturdy,strong and very fair

And thy demeanor puzzleth me so much
Thou wert raised with manners of a prince
Why eat  roast pig  sandwiches in  church?
Even holy bread is seen to wince.

Depart from me,ye green eyed coward and liar
I threw   thy missives  into my bright fire.

The light shall dazzle

6396445_6eb3f7aabf_m1

When we’re born, it’s then we see the Light
After travelling squashed and so malformed
Through a tunnel like those fairground frights
With no-one else to keep us well informed
No bus stop,no rail station,no train track
There’s only one direction, which is out
The walls themselves gyrate behind our back
Some are struck   and stuck by  fearsome doubt
The head is squeezed, the brain protests with fear
The body’s like a fish stuck in a spout
Here there are no fall back engineers
No drain inspector, plumber to call  out.
Yet by  luck or fortune most emerge
To light a-dazzle and  to love  amazed

The sins are repetitious,boring foul.

Original sin is making sense to me
As I watch the  News on my TV.
Of course,it’s not original at all
The sins are repetitious,boring foul.

I decided  that this sin’s society’s
Am I  born so evil,is this me?
No,I grew up seeing evil done
By  those with power to own the biggest bomb

Love and power are  intimately  confused
By those who wish to  take you in, to bruise
Those who love, each hope to  let you  be.
They will not impinge on our security

Is the original sin that we exist?
Or that when we’re born,we’re seldom kissed?

 

I sniff   in wonder for it smells so gross

How like a prison is my cubicle
The only company the  god-dammed ants
No human voice,mere sounds funereal
No-one to admire these woollen pants.

My brassiere has not been washed for  fifty years
I fear  a wash might spoil its perfect shape
Yet no doubt it’s been rinsed by floods of tears
When in  my lonesome misery I moped

My sweater’s  recommended for the cold
I sniff   in wonder for it smells so gross
Yet I  bought it chiefly for its mold
The mossy colour matches other clothes.

If you can afford it, get some soap,
As then your lover might enjoy a grope.

As close to me as in a marriage bed

 
As on this foreign shore I stand and stare
Across the green and foaming tidal sea.
I do not wonder whether life is fair
Nor whether what’s to come is what should be
.
The hinterland is not a wishful dream
Whatever I meet there is all itself
So useless are past thoughts and present schemes
My courage,heart and spirit are my wealth.
Although alone,I sense some being close
Whom I accept as guide and friend to me.
To walk with otherness is not my boast.

It’s he who guides and shows me how to see.

Thus with this spirit,I my spirit wed
As close to me as in a marriage be

There is no Kingdom for the European State.

The  new Messiah will  fly  on a  great horse
A  burning stallion with perfect grace
As he crosses Europe he perceives
The scattered remnants of his fellow Jews

The Jews  who buried live  made Poland  heave
The ashes of the  ones cremated  grieve.
On he rides but where is he to go?
We do not see him coming  from afar

Does he come to give acclaim  to us
The Christians  who made the Jews accursed?
Or does he ride to tell us not to wait
There is no Kingdom for old Europe’s  State.

We deny that we’re complicit and what’s worse
Any nation state’s  as bad as us.

On paper like the Weetabix comes in

I dreamed that my blood test results had come
On paper like the Weetabix comes in
I can’t recall if they were good or bad
Or whether I just threw them in the bin

I found a pair of trousers, they’re not mine
To which these test results were pinned.
So it dawned on me an error had been made
As for those trousers, I was much too thin.

Someone else has got results not theirs
I have theirs and hope that they have mine.
But why are they fixed to my fresh laundry
And how can I discover them or find?

I don’t know what this dream may symbolise
It made me oversleep with shuttered eyes

Math lover

My love was so elliptical it passed
Before the first one realised and grasped
But now I prefer the straight lines to connect
Or perhaps an obtuse angle I’ll bisect

In truth, I  married mental furniture
His mind was  parabolic in its shape
And filled it was by  study and nature
Yet spacious in its arts to let  me hope

He did not know of numbers  past belief
I enlightened him, yet he was filled with grief.
For as the caterpillar eats the very leaf
Learners  are depraved  like common thieves

I made an error beating him at chess
And when he died,  he left me no address.

Laugh at all those ghosts who   gloat and leer

Because the rate of change has been so fast
The newspaper are full of new advice
Older people living in the past
Were frequently admired for being wise.

But now I hear folk say, I’ll ask my child
As if they are afraid to take a look
As if a laptop is an untamed beast
They cannot hope to  understand the books.

So stress increases as we age and shrink
When we would love some  praise for labour done
The papers tell us what to eat and drink
And how to exercise  yet have some fun

For humour is an antidote to fear;
Laugh at all those ghosts who   gloat and leer

Even if my major rhymes are slant

When I’ve just washed twenty pairs of pants
A sonnet hardly seems the way to write
Even if my major rhymes are slant
I doubt if  it’s an  appropriate  new sight.

As for cleaning drawers and pantaloons
To even think about  those makes me weep
And yet one must not give up too soon
In favour of a pot of tea well steeped.

Oh,knickers are  a  fashion very scant
With  thongs,bikinis, waist high ones  or low
And likewise  for a man are underpants
Though men don’t seem to worry if they show.

In human life with underwear be wise
Let your choice of underpants  be lies

What, is a lowly Jew to be adored!

From the other room, melodic sounds
Fill the air,severe yet rightly proud
For frames are needed  as our  outer bounds
Within which imagination grounds.

It is five times a hundred years this  very day
That Luther put  objections  to the Church
Commemorated now in song and prayer
Yet  he may have helped the Hitler Reich

His hatred of the Jews knew not one bound
To kill them all was what he would have liked
So I cannot admire his works that deeply wound
Created by his appetite for strife.

If Jesus came back would we kill once more?
What, is a lowly Jew to be adored!

Although my ears were ringing with its rhymes

I edited  my sonnet sixty times
It didn’t seem so many to my mind
Although my ears were ringing with its rhymes
To criticise myself seems quite unkind

What seemed to be a metre was none such
I could not sing it like Gray’s Elegy
My language late at night seems Double Dutch
But writing will, like loving,  pleasure me.

If only we could edit when we speak
Instead of blurting out “the honest truth”
To stop our malice making others bleak
Or injuring their hearts with words uncouth.

When we reflect, we learn  to see our speech
As something not entirely out of reach.

 

The sunrise and the odour of men’s feet?

Will Theresa May be merrier  next year?
Will Boris Johnson  super dye his hair?
Will British people stop their hateful strife
As Brexit has struck fear into our hearts?

Why can we not enjoy the pleasures sweet
The sunrise and the odour of men’s feet?
The  dirty laundry blinds us with its white
And all my poems are  called a  load of tripe.

Can we not enjoy the polyester shirts
Of men who sweated copiously a-flirt
The nylon sheets will roll us out of bed
They can be washed by water in a flood

Will Charles become our King and rule us well
Will Princess Di rise up and give him hell?

So you are gone

So you are gone  who once declared your love
For that phantasm conjured in your mind
For onto me you brought down from above
A torment bitter and your words unkind.

Used to  friendship from within your books

You did not understand that I was real
Irritation grew as you did look;
You threw your poisoned arrows at my heel.

What once you loved then you began to hate
If not perfect then intolerable I must be
And then you cursed me with this  sorry fate
Our child was born and him you’ll never see.

Illegitimate and born in desert grey.
I carried him alone from death’s dark way

From despair, we rise to be renewed

photo0131

 

The grieving one who never looks outside
Suffers like a prisoner in a cell
Yet they have some freedom to decide
To grieve, yet view our holy world as well.

To turn the eyes back to the lost and dead.
Is what we all may do  in painful  times
But to this natural world, we must be wed;
And under suffering, draw a heavy line.

From despair, we rise to be renewed;
To see our friends and make our hearts feel glad.
And  look behind  us with a gentler view
See the joy and love and signs of kindness had.

In the sea of grief, we’ll swim not drown,
And cast away  lead weights which pull us down.

As unknown as the journey to your birth

Was this the apple then, your mother’s breast

Which father thought was his to oft caress?
And when, in deprived rage, you bit to test
In rage, he vowed to ever you harass.

So then you learned that you could hate as well,
The punishment struck hard in your small heart.
Your memory was unworded, could not tell;
Though pain and anguish made your soft skin smart.

As unknown as the journey to your birth
As shocking as the grief of unmeant wrong.
As frightening as the gauging of your worth
As sudden as the ending of a song.

Impossible to foretell or to prepare,
The ambivalence of our hearts starts here.

In the end, the truth is where love lies.

With foresight, we may see  where  problems lurk
And  root them out before they start to grow
Yet often life’s mysteriously dark
And what we reap is what another sowed.

In hindsight,  this seems obvious and plain.
But some can  pick the  true out with no pain
Yet others choose  their fantasy again
They amble down a cheerful sunny lane.

Though what is real may not be what we wish
Better truth that hurts  than lies  that charm
Reality is not an easy  choice
Yet falsehood will mislead and even harm.

Insight grows with patient watching eyes
In the end, the truth is where love lies.

A fever and intensity of will

After many hours of patient  thought
An image  of bright power  came to my mind
Enabled by  techniques  my study bought
Without such language, anyone is blind.

A fever and intensity  of will
Made my brain catch fire and flash, ignite.
And yet the image glowing was quite still
As if to demonstrate perpetual light.

As I lay in bed the vision came
Unprovoked, not known of, gave me sight
Many years of patient study  gained
The power of signs and symbols, their delight.

The vision came inspired by will and art
To motivate  me for the travails of the heart

But gold or diamonds glorify the bed.

When ancient peoples sacrificed to god
They offered up the best of what they had.
The king’s own son would be the frequent choice
As insulting a god was seen as vice.

And when a man goes courting for a bride
He offers  her a ring that satisfies
He does not give her tin or zinc or lead
But gold or diamonds glorify the bed.

Yet here in modern or post-modern times
We offer up the lowest as our sacrifice.
And so the wealthy shall go straight to hell
As murderers of the sick and poor who fell.

In the past, the rich gave to the poor
But now they burned them up in Grenfell Tower.

 

 

Which of us desires to dress for war?

My polyester trench coat  looks real swell
But inside it, I feel as hot as hell.
And when the storm hit, I found out
It is no raincoat, I have no more doubts.

Which of us desires to dress for war
This is what the trench coat was made for.
British soldiers  on the battlefields
Died in mud locked trenches for what yield?

Do we want to know the Middle East
Was divided by the conquerors at their feast
France and Britain split the old Empire
We see from that the rise of Herr Hitler.

The war to end all wars is on stage yet.
Go hang these trench coats  round the scapegoat’s neck

Acupuncture

The lithium battery shone in innocence.
I nearly hit it with the hammer  in dismay
I’d put it in the wrong way up, I was too tense.
To get it out was nothing like child’s play.

Why are those instruction books so wee?
I looked on youtube, at a simpler one
I nearly stuck the knife into my knee
A kind of acupuncture overdone

Yes, wee is what we Irish say for small
I’m not English since  they voted  to withdraw
I could be Danish, Swedish, Dutch or naught at all.
Since the  Tories smashed the common law.

As  I wept while mending the doorbell
A man called out, you’re clever, I can tell!

If I did not write

If I did not write  I could clean house
Wash the curtains, hang them on the line
Polish my small table and my mouse
Make  a chocolate cat and drink more wine

If I did not write I could go shop
Buy elegance and  amber  with old pearls
Go to  a hairdresser, buy a frock
Write a poem in a cursive swirl

If I did not write then I might read
George Herbert and  the  metaphysicals again
The Guardian Review and that would lead
To  rambling perplexed down a dale in rain

Yes, writing  gives me happiness most times
Despite the loss of metre and slant  rhymes

Another mind

16266224_851381855001694_5051226090509090109_n

 

From time and place and season I am lost,

Disorientated ,missing tracks well worn.

Do not suppose I’m unaware of cost,

Nor label me with epithets of scorn.

For usual paths lead to the usual place.

The safest way to live and perhaps to die,

But wandering through the woods I find new space

and in wild grasses with the fox I lie.

Through distant trees, I see a way to go

As narrow as a slit in  pale limestone.

I pass in silence as if in deep,deep snow.

My courage rises even as I groan.

Remember when we’re lost ,we may then find

Another way,a place,another mind.

Outside the Lamb and Flag

Flung into the heights by a fast car
I had a feeling time had gone  too slow
I  fluttered like an unsmoked black cigar
No fear nor anguish  gave me any blow

As I flew I looked down at the earth
I saw a screen where Einstein turned the wheel
The world’s a film and this is a new birth
There are dimensions peril makes us feel

Them I turned geometric in my flight
I reached the apex, fell to earth like stone
A flash of golden stars entered my sight
I lay upon St Giles; it thrashed my bones.

What we see is not all that is here.
Where’s the Lamb who runs the pub revered?

 

 

Into this green dream, its world is hauled

From being a cliche, lawn, flowers, boring shrubs
My years of sickness grew the garden wild
Now a meld of birdsong, wind, and wood
I yearn to enter, yes, I am beguiled.

Like an island in the suburb’s sprawl
The penetrating focus of owl’s eye
Into this green dream,  its world is hauled
For survival, wildness has turned spy.

Even if, at  last, survives one  tree
One leaf, one branch, one root, one  seeded pod
There  a nest of singing birds shall be
There shall be a presence of the good.

Until  our world’s destroyed by burning lies,
Poets shall sing and chant until all dies.

Behind me the imagined Abbey dreams

The knobbled grassy hillocks we walked on
May  be the graves of monks who are long gone
The vertical remains in one high wall
From which a blackbird makes his sunset call.

The  plainchant sung for centuries is here
For  us who open up our inner ear
The sacred music floats away like leaves
Caught and carried by an autumn breeze

We stood beside the river, hand in hand
The water was as clear  as love’s demands
And still, in my mind’s eye, I see that stream
Behind me  the imagined Abbey dreams

An elegiac moment caught in words
Entranced by symbols  like the darting birds

From being wise, a fool I am now grown

Although I cared for my old one alone
It seems now he is gone I need advice
From being wise, a fool I am now grown
So I am given orders; oh, surprise!

Do I sleep or eat or wash my bras
Do I wear clean knickers in the morn?
Intrusive,disrespectful ,tra,la lah!
On these cheeky folks, I pour my scorn

If I turn to gypsy ways of life
A wooden caravan and my own horse
I will be troubled by the heat of strife
I fear I shall become an alien coarse

Where were  they when I travailed alone,
Carrying in my breast a heavy stone?

As then I could be evil without jest

Has a girl been raped, a senior person  mugged?
Has someone knocked your wall down with an axe?
Your door key pinched; your smart TV  been bugged;
Your handbag snatched, your smartphone duly hacked
Blame the victim!

Has a photo for your “lover ”  gone viral?
Have you been told you’re much too nice to live?
Have you been through a trauma or a trial?
Has a man demanded love, ungiving his?
Blame the victim

Did your mother spend the money on her clothes?
Were you sent to school in ripped old dress?
Did she “forget” when cruel insults she gave?
Did she send you to church so you’d confess?
Blame the victim

If everyone was wicked it were best
As then I could be evil without jest.

Struggle in the mind

When doubts and drawbacks struggle in the mind

And certainty seems but a demon dream,
When faith to love is what  we   cannot find
For even when asleep, the mind still schemes

 

When darkness and defeat seem close at hand
And lights dim even as we pray for grace
when wrecks and ruins rile the native sands
When in this life we feel we’ve lost our place…

 

Then at the saddest depth, we see the light
Surrounding with such warmth, with love adorned
The path that seemed so wrong now leads us right
And in our hearts, warm feelings are newborn.

 

For in all storms there is calm still eye
From which we note the fiercest clouds  rush by

We touch the one who is our own true source

We do not need to fear a loathsome thought
They travel through our minds and then move on
Perfect peace of mind cannot be bought
Do not replay these thoughts for we will grieve.

If one day we feel of little worth
Who are we to judge and so condemn?
Do we think we are unduly cursed?
The underlying peace does still remain

Our central core can always be re-found
In silence, music or the human voice
In such rhythm and melody   now bound
We touch the One who is our own true source

Let all float by without the need to seize
Rumination is to blame for much unease

More subtle is the need to do no harm

What love and friendship can at once entail
Are boundaries elastic and yet firm.
Yet even that is but a mere detail
More subtle is the need to do .no harm

For in the flush of youthful spirits strong
We do not like to know that all love fades
nor when it does a lover may do wrong
So to evil, he may find out he has paid
And with the stone-faced demons, he belongs.

Thus friendship love and joy involve the will
To take the other as she comes to be
For all our goodness there may be a bill
Acknowledge this, it follows truth we’ll see.

Accepting that perfection is remote
We play our tunes and suffer every note