Different Planet and Shadows of Time

Isle of Wight holiday Poem No2. Zigzag Road

2011-06-13T04:11:00.000-07:00

We went down
Zigzag Road.
Did we obey
the green
cross code.
Did we hell?
In Ventnor
down "bronchitis
alley", the
hyperventilating
valley -with
over-active
temperature
changes.
When Zig and
Zag, cartoon
characters
from the past
displayed
the road sign
from the mailbag
of childrens goodies
and toys did
they expect
that road sign of
that name
displayed for all
to see?

Isle of Wight Holiday Poetry 1. Chine Sunshine

2011-06-13T03:58:00.000-07:00

We walked across
the Chine in
sunshine.
Simon Ledger
singing Nat
King Cole to
a group of Island
pensioners.
Should it be
Kung Fu Fighting
His Karl Douglas
impression landed
him on the
front page of "The
Sun".
Yes, it did go
wong.
Dancing down
the Chine
to "Unforgettable"
40s chimes and
music.
You might even
lose it to
the psychedelic
coloured lights
LSD for purists.
Chine sunshine
silver lining
Crabb Inn
Hollier's Hotel.
Watching
regional Icarus
solar activity
In my Simon's
dad's video
playing as
we came in the
visitors room
Chine sunshine,
deja-vous.
Isle of Wight,
skies blue.
Melting on the
sublime River
Chine in Shanklin.

National Poetry Writing Month Poem No 9.

2011-04-09T14:55:00.000-07:00

Road Jam

I'm in the
road jam,
we've been stuck
in it for hours.
We're in the
road jam,
there is no
flower power.
In the tunnel
choked from
summer love
We could've
took the train
instead to
Enfield and
back
but there
is no riot
just road jams
in the chocker block
polluted
capital.
Oh to be back
in Smogville
Boro,
not road
jam choked
London
fighting to
unpick the
words of
truth
through the thin grey veil
of southern snobbery.

National Poetry Writing Month Poem No8. Looking for Inspiration

2011-04-09T14:44:00.000-07:00

Looking for Inspiration

I am running short of inspiration
as I look at a nation
full of vitriol
and antagonism.
Where the people in
high places
decorate themselves
with honours
and royalties
celebrities
build up
their images
like deities
and those
who conform
and follow
suit
end up
as parodies
of themselves.
While masquerading
as the gods
and goddesses
of today
the media
simply
embrace
the mainstream
guides thoughts,
actions and
beliefs
while corporate
enterprises
have us hooked
on cooking the
books
While the bankers hoard
we grin and obey
the tune of today
While the new order
grasps their
opportunities
carpe diem
seize the day
while the
world is left
on a precipice
that mankind made.

National Poetry Writing Month Poem 7. The Ghost Bus

2011-04-07T08:17:00.000-07:00

The Ghost Bus

The ghost bus gleamed
grey in the summer haze
Pink cherry blossom
oozed from the pores
of tree branches.
Leaffall came
from Wallington Green
But the ghost bus remained
stony grey
Through the icy tentacles
of winter woodland
to the growing
depths of Spring
Where burrowed
among the squirrels
and the foxes den
a willowy wraithful
figure loomed.
Buried in the
headlines of the
newspapers
Black and white as the
Daily Mail or The Sun
The bus driver drow the slow
way home.
Among the bright
red London buses
Hidden for a moment
then thrust in time,
ten years to the day
the bus driver passed away
And now merely like a flashback
or a timeslip from the past
The ghost bus
took the long road home.

National Poetry Writing Month Poem No6. The Letter.

2011-04-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

The Letter

I wrote him a letter
to say I could not bear no more
to live my life at the end of a rainbow.

I wrote him a letter to
reveal the truth.
Beyond expressions of anger
in the heat of the moment.

I wrote him a letter to empty my head of negative
emotions.
The letter only
voiced a few words
and was sealed
with a final kiss,
stamped
and sent.

National Poetry Writing Month No 5. His first steps

2011-04-05T14:08:00.000-07:00

His First Steps

We captured his first steps
on video camera
but I will always remember,
his face, his love, his trust
when he took them for me.

My son, my love, my darling
my child of love, compassion,
my heart in his
his eyes in mine
They were his first steps
for my first time.

National Poetry Writing Month Poem 3. Revolutionary's Song

2011-04-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

Revolutionary's Song

I want to start a revolution
but I don't know anything
about marching in time
with the rhythm and blues
or a turncoat's shoes.
A planned rebellion
is giving into envy
is highly charged
is written in the stars
is fatally flawed.
We look for a solution
we have the same cause
we want a fairer world
But who's telling the truth?
The left wing brigade.
Or the right wing fascist state.
We want to start a revolution
but we are pacifists
who don't want war
But we fight among ourselves
The answer is simple
Scientifically we are all the same,
lets give up the game
and turn to the moderate centre
or better still
let the good guys prosper,
the bad fall away
through mutual co-operation,
understanding difference.
Love may conquer all
Let the walls fall away
and the truth be said
Give the homeless homes,
set the weak free
and the strong at the top,
take the burden and pay their way.

National Poetry Writing Month Poem 3. Death wish

2011-04-03T08:31:00.001-07:00

I was inspired by today's interesting quote where you were invited to write a poem predicting your own death, a little morbid you may say! But anyway I had a go and this is the result.

Poem 3. Death Wish

I will die as the sun sets on a midsummer
day, sipping red wine
and eating creme broulet.
The sun will fall down on me
while a guardian angel wept
swept away by the tides
as the dark clouds crept.
My heart is the ocean,
my soul on fire
with the red wine of desire
and the sinister assassin,
that grim reaper drank in
my wine
and let out its breath.
The highs and the lows,
the rise and the fall
of mountains at my feet
and the choirs of angels
at sinners gate.
Where heaven is altered,
the Earth reclaimed
by happy people who
speak his name
resonating through
the grass where the
snake slipped away
and dark angels spoke and craved
and drove away the
spirit, blood was spilt and
shed and then he rose again
and I was dead
and he spoke to the people
and gave them bread
Then they thanked and
worshipped the one true Lord
who heaven sent,
beloved, adored.

National Poetry Writing Month Poem 2. Bobby Moore

2011-04-02T13:28:00.000-07:00

I was inspired by a prompt from yesterday to write a poem based on three book titles to incorporate in a poem that were at home. I came up with three that did not belong to me but another member of the household. The titles were "Bobby Moore" "The Black Death" and "Jesus: The Evidence"

2, Bobby Moore - Saviour Reborn

They resurrected you, Bobby Moore, football Messiah of the East End
When the black sentiment of death took you too soon.
You were England's World Cup Captain hero,
dressed in the purest white robes.
Like Jesus, though not the creeping variety.
Evidence for you was legendary and
true,
But you weren't crucified,
nails hammered in.
You were the East End king.
Holding England's World Cup on high,
The Holy Grail, Heaven's resurrected Messiah.
But when the black scents of death
struck home.
English football's malaise
lasted many decades
with no new Jerusalem
Just bucketfuls of rubbish as the
foreign powers marched on
and England's death
owes much to the death
of true heroes like Bobby.
Now he's yesterday's chip paper
Todays legends are celebrity
brands like David Beckham's
or pirhouetting primadonnas
like Christiano Ronaldo,
Bobby Moore was English through and through
His tackle full of grit, honest and true.
A saviour, maybe not Jesus
but as Easter comes God rest good
Bobby Moore, your soul.
Where's the evidence you may say?
It's out there for one and all.

National Poetry Month Challenge - a poem a day. Poem 1. Olive Hill

2011-04-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

Hello, this is the beginning of a one month challenge, 30 poems, 1 each day for the month of April. I look forward to receiving any comments or feedback, which would be much appreciated.

Olive Hill

Olive Hill was a child through and through
Her green cats eyes gazed like spies
Her nose was crooked and her tongue black
Webbed feet and a hunched back
She did not fit in, was unloved
and believed that her life was a dream
When she finally woke up
her mouth was rosebud,
her face serene
She was a child again,
eating ice cream with daddy.
He melted away into nothing.
And from that day onwards Olive knew
no one would hurt her again.
She had died that day with her dreams.
A village girl of 22.
She walked alone with her hunched back
Ready to crack
open a can or two
of white lightening
which was frightening
in a concoction of drugs,speed, weed and cocaine.
She was a lover of Kurt Cobaine and
went the same way,
Her mum disowned her wild child stray,
Until Olive Hill
went for the kill
The bitterest pill.
The sweetest last breath
before
death.

Anarchy in the UK

2011-01-24T04:51:00.000-08:00

Anarchy in the UK
Violence on the streets
Churchill's statue defaced
Students photograph the invaders
Cammilla and Charlie boy get a hammering
This people power, this revolution
dissolved in dissolution
the police have ran away
the politicians struggling on
to tackle the unholy mess
the defecit
While I sympathise to a degree
How can we condone such anarchy.
This is no Tiannamen Square
We are free to vent our fury if we so wish
But this evil destruction of London
This mindless villainy
incinerates hope
inflames our misery
Good loving hearts wail
at our condemnation
of our nation
Let not civil blood
bleed civil strife.
Nor let we kill our brother
with this night's long knives.

The Myopic Man

2010-12-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

The Myopic Man

The sores in his eyes were burning him like pieces of flying ash. He tried his spectacles on. At first he was more than satisfied. The metallic pair of 1960s NHS spectacles gave him a feeling of superiority and an unparalleled expectation of future unimpaired vision.

Donald Jardine was anything but extraordinary. He worked as a fishmonger in an East-End market town. He lived in Ilford, Essex. He passed his days anonymously in his first floor flat with only his dog, Laurie for company. Donald had worn glasses every since he was a five year old child with ginger hair and considered geeky by his peers. His parents thought mistakenly with Donald’s serious disposition that he must be intellectually superior to other children. But this simply was not the case. Consequently this left Donald with an inferiority complex and smattering of lost hopes and dreams that displaced him in a world of dreary limbo.

At five years of age he was fitted with his first pair of NHS glasses. Diagnosed with long-sightedness – astigmatism, he had no choice but to wear glasses on a permanent basis.

But despite Donald’s dull and ordinary personality he was blessed with the rare gift of second sight.

Donald could see into the future with his spectacles and was uncannily able to predict future events before they happened. He could actually witness these events as they unravelled from his spectacles.

Donald remembered that crucial afternoon in the optician’s room where he would wait as a petrified child for his eye-drops to be administered to him by the vilest optical nurse he ever had the dubious pleasure of meeting.

Ann Kaye she was called. He never forgot her. Short dark stringy perm, thick horn rimmed spectacles. Spartan brown skirt, matronly, grey blouse. Red spots, angry black heads. She must have been fifty or a little more with her acne allowed to proliferate, evidently never having disappeared since she was a teenager.

The eye-drops were administered by this vile specimen of humanity in ten sharply stinging pincer movements with the woman’s spongy hands. The optical nurse, Miss Kaye – it was no surprise to Donald she was not married and had no children given her aversion to kids, so he presumed anyway.

“Stop whinging child,” she barked like a school head-mistress.

The drops were like huge lumps of icy hot acid being plunged into him. Perversely it appeared that Miss Kaye deliberately indulged in taking as long as possible with each child forever prolonging their misery.

Miss Kaye might have been every child’s monstrous nightmare but now at thirty-three years of age Donald was coming to terms with the possibility that he could lose his sight altogether.

His prognosis had been good. Up until his nineteenth year Donald had continued to wear his glasses at all times resulting in a gradual improvement in his vision. This was despite the taunting of school bullies who often thought it appropriate to take them off at which point they would grab, bend and break them.

The bullying was all but a small microcosm of what was to come. Then paranoia, whispered words in the school canteen. “Swot! Swot!”

But the visions were not simply products of a mind deranged and obliterated by years of mental torment. The visions only appeared when he wore his spectacles transferring his world beyond all imaginings.

A surreal mind-map which when translated into reality was beyond the pall of psychotic delusion.

Then one day he stood next to his arch nemesis with her aristocratic mannerisms.

Eleanor. Exquisite, lethal, poignant. A poisoned chalice of corrupted innocence. Her artificial regal bearing glared with a demonic luminescence.

“Beauty is only skin deep,” as his mother would say.

Her dark bluebottle eyes reflected both the tragedy and the despair beyond all earth shattering proportions.

Eleanor, that piece of Britain. That timeless gem that could have come from antiquity, an archetype of British nobility. Donald walked in her shadow everywhere from the shores of exotic Haiti where he had met her with her family on a huge cruise-ship where he worked as a trainee sous chef on the former warship, Victoria.

Through her eyes he saw the world. Beacons of perplexed lunacy. Apocalyptic, and when he took off her spectacles Eleanor was no longer there.

A missing relic from a bygone era, gone disappeared forever from his mutilated mind.

Donald felt like the hand of God had been upon him only to be dragged away at the last moment like a marked man awaiting his execution.

“Myopia”. Mr Phillips, the brusque optician said he had but Donald knew he had something more than that. The spectacles reflected more than his myopic vision but a second sight unparalleled and hidden away in his confused mind.

“This means you can see things clearly from close distances but further off is much more difficult”

The long winded scientific description went by the wayside in Donald’s mind.

Donald wanted no-one to know his secret. Reticent as always he approached Eleanor. In her mercurial way she challenged everything he knew about life, from the black and white notions of his childhood to the sweetest sensations of the flesh. Holding him in her bosom like a mother tending to her baby son, she let him suckle her breasts. Then if felt as if the tree of life transcended all in its glory.

Those were the days. The 1960s passed and her autumn years loomed ahead of her. Eleanor reciprocated Donald’s love providing his second sight and vision, like seven pillars of wisdom.

Harshly gloating as she said to him, “I know all. I have experienced everything life had to offer me. The remnants of my life will be flesh wounds on you, Donald. I have been crucified, damned and burned. I am the first and the last of everything. The Alpha and the Omega reside within me, I am the beginning. I am the end.”

Then like a banshee she was gone, overcome by the heavens while the world turned and gravity exploded.

Within him there was a gradual shift in his attitude which was apocalyptic in magnitude. The extremities of the two forces, good and evil fought within him to maintain control with catastrophic consequences.

The atmosphere melted into nothing and it was as if the end of the world was nigh.

But then she counselled him, told him about the stars and the planets and the many fallen lost universes before Earth’s time began. Eleanor said to Donald, “Human beings will be aliens in their favoured lands. Nature will be no longer. Mankind will conspire to destroy itself.”

She came to Donald with something she called the Fake Book. When opened, a flock of birds appeared. Donald heard them twittering away. They sounded like harpies, the devil’s children, acolytes bound in reverence to an evil queen, enshrining and glorifying her. With every swift success she took a bow. Her arrogance was terrible. Then the book was shut and the secrets once again hidden.

Donald awoke to the sound of T-Rex’s “Ride a White Swan” ripping his ears out in its unashamed intensity. The colours of the world with their light and dark shades merged with the music to explode in Donald’s eyes to one huge beam of blinding ultra violet rays.

Love, beauty overwhelmed him. These were more than abstractions but the lightening reflexes of the pinpointed cushions of atomic energy. The clouds were not simply fluffy lily pads fighting for space in the sunlight. They were controlled by a creator who held the world together by one giant fingertip.

Then Eleanor appeared in all her splendour.

She might have been carved in ivory partly honed from that kind of aristocratic porcelain fragility but also from a supreme sense of Celtic or elfin charm.

In her palms was a wilting bouquet of roses and her face when pierced against the rose thorns showed pure tears innocently crafted on her cheeks, as if put there, fated.

Then her jaw, chiselled too perfectly hardened and it was as if a shadow had clutched hold of her and then like a naked white flame she was gone again, as if with the smallest dust mites in the air. Had she ever been there in the first place?

But Donald knew. She was the past, present and the future. The beginning and the end. Immortality dovetailed through the clouds and every spark of sunlight spoke her name lost in the leaves but always throughout time remembered.

Then the sparks faded. Donald had taken his glasses off and he was back to a sort of normality that was both bleak and surreal.

His mum was there polishing his shoes, curlers rolled in her hair, shouting him up from the parlour.

“Donald! Donald! Come down this instant.”

“Yes mum. I’m coming,” he groaned. The year is 1966, Donald quickly gets rid of his Viz comic and wanders lazily downstairs,”

“You’re missing the World Cup final, son, are you off your head?”

“Ok I’m coming,” he replied moodily.

“Some people are on the pitch, they think it‘s all over. It is now”.

Donald simply walked passed the telly un-interested as shouts from his father and beams from his mother told of England’s greatest ever moment in its history – winning the World Cup.

But even then he doubted this event’s reality, as if he was in an imagined past and reality a deluded concept.

Then Eleanor appeared again in all her omniscience. All powerful like a deity itself she smiled at Donald that long teasing smile he loved so much. But then was she real at all? Had her existence been like some passing transient moment, a subtle kiss in the dark, or a false memory? Past, present or future, he had no idea where he was or if he existed at all.

They were the cream of the crop, the aristocrats of high society, revealed Eleanor as she opened the book again. Its presence was the oddest thing Donald had ever seen. In fact it appeared alien, abnormal, even to someone like himself who doubted his even being of belonging in the planet such were the extent of his vision.

He kept saying to himself at moments like these. I am Donald Jardine, bon 1954. I am fifty-six year old and work as a fishmonger in Ilford, Essex. I am married to Donna for just under a year and everything I am seeing is lies, lies, delusions, or time-slips.

Donald remained unconvinced by this argument, but then she appeared. No, not Eleanor this time but Donna in a vague mist, that looked somewhere between a bubble and a thought shower, teaching Three E at school, admonishing him like one of her pupils, for what. Trivial little things like picking his nails or wearing his tie slightly askew. The little first floor grimy flat that they lived in above the fishmongers felt like a strange glimmer of a reality in his mad existence.

Then Eleanor appeared with her words or terror and truth. There was a world somewhere between now and eternity that existed only in the mind of egotistical dreamers. Where birds twittered away and the fake book revealed a slow passage to damnation.

She stirred like an animal nursing an injured limb, bellowing now at him. “Well Donald. You’ve done it now haven’t you? You fool. You imposter! I revealed to you my secrets and what do you do? Indulge in your inglorious past of sin and iniquity.”

“It’s not true” shouted Donald, as the dream ended and reality, whatever that was hit home in all its gross degenerateness.

The man was standing at the top of a mountain. He was going for the drop. Begging for someone to pull him out of his lunacy. But that man wasn’t Donald, it was someone else; no it could not be him. The man’s face was haggard; he was a broken haunted man. But this was simply a vision Donald reasoned, a possibility of things to come. No it wasn’t fact or fiction or even a mixture of both.

But Donald’s rationalism was flawed; Eleanor had shown him that from the moment they had first met. Donna was obliterated, Donna was no longer important. Donna was unnecessary to him. Donna was nothing but a mousy whinger, who clung to him for affection like the bitterest threads of an appalled normality.

Donald felt wretched. He stood outside the fishmongers with his hand to his chest; the stabbing pains were coming back again. As he moved slightly left he felt a horribly intense sense of longing. For what though? This feeling was mysterious to Donald. How could you for one minute think that you are dying and the next longing for a world beyond existence or imagination?

“Darling?”

Donald was feeling for his spectacles in his pocket, they were grimy and in definite need of a clean. Sparks of bizarre certainty overcame his heightened mental state of confusion.

Eleanor. He could see her drowning in a well of unhappiness, her features fractured, impaired, wounded by her sorrow. She was going down now, down, down into this manifestly evil supernatural hell that enclosed her, reigned her mortal self in. He witnessed her crucified upside down like St Peter, attempting to continue the endurance of Christ’s suffering on the Cross. But her face, pallid and deeply wounded had an immortal split that was suddenly cleansed and healed. She was immortal now, saintly, beatified.

Then he awoke like a child who had succumbed to a wicked witch’s evil spell. He felt for his spectacles and saw that they were broken into many shards of glass on the floor.

Donald felt like he had been hit by a mortal wound. He was that man holding onto the cliff face and Donna was there in tears, wrecked by a misery that Donald could not event contemplate. The continuous train of visionary though that Donald had accustomed himself for so long had finally caught up with him. He was completely out of touch with reality now.

Then the van came with the men in white coats. Donald clung to the cliff’s edge like a child holding a teddy bear for comfort like the lost remnants of an unclear past.

He awoke to the sound of sirens and a burning memory etched on his mind forever. Donna clinging on him for dear life holding him in her arms like a first-born. But then as Donald looked at the flowery curtains of an acute psychiatric ward his mind mocked him. The flowers became thorns and his head became crowned with them like a Christ figure bearing the sorrow of the world’s sins and his anguish. Donald had never been especially religious although he had a brief flirtation with a woman named Eleanor, his Theology teacher as a fresher at his local college of further education. Her eyes burned into them tingling. Donna’s eyes became Eleanor’s. Eleanor the mythical, Eleanor the real.

Then there was nothing but a desolate hill in the middle of nowhere but scrubland and rows of stone pillars pointing to the sun.

Then she was there mocking him again. Like every woman ever had. The conspiracy had forced him into deep sorry but still he fought for rationality. But then there was none. The Earth hit the Sun and it was gone but for the Evil Queen with her harpies and her husband the Beast. The fake book opened then closed and all was revealed in on unholy mess.

Donald was looking down on himself; the light was becoming closer now. He could almost reach it but for a woman clothed in white light. She was mercurially beautiful and he wanted her unlike any other. Then Eleanor came with her Saxon hoards and many minions. Eleanor in Haiti flirting with the Krays and the high dignitaries and ambassadors. Eleanor who was involved in the murder of John F Kennedy.

The twilight came, the evil queen revealed was not Eleanor, nor Donna, nor the evil fabrications that tore his mind apart. But a man, no more than a man, a beast, a thunderous man on a horse, wearing a Napoleonic hat guiding his forces through the quagmires of the Earth, seeking his New World Order.

Then the end came like Donald prophesied, the light grew stronger, the riots on the street had become blood baths, innocent people were murdered, tortured and imprisoned, and the Christ appeared again holding his hand out to Donald. Donald reached for the light as it grew stronger and then he saw not Eleanor, not Donna, but his whole life running past him in reverse like a weirdly mawkish sideshow, with laughing puppeteers and revered comedians fanning their skills across the nation like flames of electrical fire and thunder.

Then Donald saw his glasses, neatly repaired, in good order. He was sitting opposite the optician who was continuing his long speech about the need to wear the spectacles at all times. So Donald put them on. Then something happened that blurred the bridge between the unreal and reality.

The Napoleonic man came through a window at a hurtling pace but was barely hurt by the savage shock of the glass to his flesh wounds. Donald opened his eyes. They were burning him like pieces of flying ash. The optical nurse came towards him with her pincer like fingers. Her fingernails were longer, manicured, and there was subtle essence that came from her perfume.

“So? Have you finished playing now, child?”

“I’m sorry, I thought…”

“You though what,” there was a kind silky lightness to her voice that did not quite ring true.

“The mind is a strange thing,” said Ann Kaye

“But, but,”

“Take my advice, Donald. Start over again. Treat everything in a different light”.

Then he remembered what his mum always told him of looking outward and not inward. Donald felt this sharp intake of terror.

He realised that he had not lived his life in the real world. He had hidden himself in his mind’s darkest shadows struggling to find any sort of light or cohesion. He had invented Eleanor; a character based on a simple school boy fantasy crush for his teacher, and turned her into something more than fantasy. The delusions had won control over him and somewhere he had lost his mind and Donna in consequence. His life now felt like a strange lie of subterfuge, depression, lost hopes and dark dreams.

But now he was back here, a boy again, given another chance by the light that had inched close to him that had turned his delusions into something fantastical and supernatural, and gave him that chance to start again and to change.

He walked how from the opticians, his NHS spectacles firmly in place and realised the extent his imagination and desire to be something special, and something he wasn’t melted away into nothing.

He looked in his mirror, and fiddled with his spectacles slightly. He opened a book to start reading, then it was all revealed, Eleanor came back strangling his every hope and dream, but he still loved her, she was real.

He saw himself, a sailor in Hawaii with Eleanor in tow his bride. Wicked, surreal, exciting and loving, she was his future, past, his everything. As she destroyed him, the evil Queen in her last strangling embrace, Donald was reborn, a beast wearing his Napoleonic crown fighting for his new order on the empty dying streets of an imminent apocalypse.

Copyright © Carol Fenwick

Pope and splendour

2010-09-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

All the pomp,
all the splendour
Salute the pope
the truth was rendered
from a secular flag
which said to revere Christ
and not the pope
I cannot with conscience run with the throng
I don't despise him just think
what is wrong with the world?
Just get on with each other
respect one anothers view
Love your enemy
understand
that all is flawed,
none are without sin
including the papacy
so I will not stand with the throng
but I still believe

The Wandle Trail

2010-06-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

The Wandle Trail
leads out from
Carshalton Ponds.
I find the Westcroft
leisure centre
simply by chance,
pop-in, collect a leaflet,
then walk
back with
Samuel.

On our journey
we had already
passed an Italian
Cafe in a 50s
timewarp.
Eating lemon meringue
Thinking for a second I
was in Milan.
But as I cross
the Wandle Trail,
only signposts as
my guide
I cannot get lost
even if I tried.
For the panoramic
views are beautiful
and the sky clear,
serene.
I pass through
many walkways,
Samuel sleeping
in his push
chair, he opens
his eyes once
to wake up
and then to
express the enormity
of his love for
me his mummy
and life.
At this point
a nice lady
comes up and
coos at Samuel.
I'm used to this.
"How old is he?"
"Nearly eight,"
I say
with pride
For the boy by my
side is my angel
my darling of
all good things.
Embracing joy
in Beddington.

Beddington

2010-06-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

Beddington

I saw the fountains open
as if in
a dream.
Many tiny
gurgling waterfalls
purified from
water to the
wine of Christ's
love.

Bestowed gently
on this place
of quiet sanctuary
Even the algae
is clean, the
weeds don't over-ride
and buttercup
bushes, mayflower
and laburnum
are softly manicured
by distinctive
ivory hands of
humility, our
nature, humbled
by prodigies,
the one God,
natural,
untamed,
wild, real
Father, Son
and Holy
Spirit
alive in
Beddington.
I see St Mary's
steeple
and know I
have found home.