original poem – Page 76 – don't confuse the narrator

star’ku

Watching shooting stars,
your arm around my shoulders

No need for wishes

For those who are looking for more perseids, I posted a few other pieces on the subject of shooting stars this time last year.

non-existent blue

giant fennel plants silhouetted against blue sky and clouds

Adaptation

I could show you a planet where creatures
walk upright on two legs. Seeing
a non-existent blue, they name it sky, and stretch
towards stale light in ignorance. Oblivious
to gravity which anchors them, they carve
each step through swirling gas as if a vacuum
and breathe in toxins unaware. Insular
as paramecia, they can’t converse
with any of the other untold tenant species
of their world. They know no other life.

(I don’t know when I wrote this, but it turned up recently among a set of pieces I’ve been trying to organise. It doesn’t seem to belong there, so perhaps it belongs here.)

misreading

I become more and more dependent on my glasses, but even when I am wearing them, letters dance on the page – and they do so even more when the text is on the screen.

The following sprang from a misreading of a perfectly normal expression:

Phrases of the moon

A single quotation mark
opens the discourse, which swells
to a full-mouthed ‘O’, then fades;
a silver comma follows, and then
silence.

a bee in her pocket

Last time I found a carpenter bee in my pocket, it was alive – at least until I stuck my hand in to find out what was in there and it stung me.

Today, though, the poor thing was already dead when I reached in thinking I must have left a tissue in my pocket when my jeans went in the wash.

I suppose if didn’t put my clothes on straight from the washing line, both of them might have lived, but who irons jeans?

The photo is only intended to give an idea of the size of the creature, and explain why, even desiccated in death, its bulk could be mistaken for a paper hanky. I put the keys there to give an idea of scale, and then remembered this old poem:
Continue reading “a bee in her pocket”

fragmented sunshine

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the heat, everything slows down for the summer in Spain, so I’m finally getting time to think about revising some old poems.

This fragment comes from a far longer piece, but I think it’s worth posting it as a stand-alone, particularly as the blog is in dire need of an update: