Tag: poem

a horse of a different colour

After I published yesterday’s post, I remembered that I do have other poems with horses in, including the very summery Before breakfast, which begins:

When the dew lies cool in the day’s eyes, beyond
the umbelliferous lace of napkin fields
morning horses toss and fret, and rooks stalk
among the stubble.

Those “morning horses” were not as quiet as the ones in the Ted Hughes poem, where the narrator “[…] climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark” before coming across the horses: “Grey silent fragments/ Of a grey silent world.”
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neigh-saying

This early in the year it probably behooves me to be positive, but it’s been a bit of a grey day and I’m saddled with updating the blog, although I’m bridling at the thought.

The big hitch is that my head seems to be mane-ly stuffed with sawdust – the ideas are hardly jockeying for position in the race to be written. Indeed, progress has completely stalled for the last few hours and I’m beginning to think wild horses couldn’t drag a blog post out of me today.
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second chance

I think many people would say that 2016 has been a strange year. Perhaps some would even describe it as “less than satisfactory”.

For me personally, the year has had some appreciable highs, made more obvious by some fairly noticeable lows, and although I’ve done quite a lot, I haven’t managed to achieve as much as I would have liked.
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Boxing Day

Yesterday was December 25th, Christmas Day. Which makes today St Stephen’s Day; it’s the second day of Christmas, the day on which my true love sent me a pair of turtle doves, and in the UK it’s also known as Boxing Day.

It’s been a few years since I posted this, so here’s a topical love poem, taken from my collection Around the Corner from Hope Street.

Boxing Day poem

under duress

It’s Christmas Eve and I really would rather be elsewhere – probably not in the local pub where there’s a karaoke evening in full swing, but perhaps in the kitchen where there’s a bottle of something suitably cheap and fizzy, half full or half empty depending on your point of view.

But I have a blog to write.
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