shooting stars – Page 2 – don't confuse the narrator

One of the poems I submitted to the South Bank Poetry Magazine competition earlier this year was Getting Around on the Underground, a sort of reminiscence of romantic and risqué encounters around London by a female narrator.

Somewhere amid the rambling it contains the following:

[…]the time we sneaked into St James’s Park
and lay at 2 a.m. in August dark, spaced out on meteor scatter,
cool grass at our backs, the universe heavy above us.[…]

Of course that scene was inspired by the memory I mentioned yesterday of watching the Perseids in Battersea Park back in the early Eighties.
Continue reading “more perseids”

It’s 4 a.m. and you stand on the lawn,
knees slightly bent, head back, facing
infinity, scanning for meteors. Come on;
it’s time for bed, I Zebedee, but you beg,
Just one more. And so I watch you
watching for falling stars, diamond scatter
from the Milky Way, and think of the tip-tilt,
star-gazey hare in the moon. There! look!
You point skywards, but the pointing finger
roots me firmly to the earth. Come on,
I say, but you are galaxies away, determined
to wait for Just one more.

It’s that time of year again: time for the Perseids, which I saw for the first time lying in Battersea Park two day’s after I had my wisdom teeth out. Although I was with a couple of radio hams who assured me they were ‘meteor scatter’, even some thirty years later I still wish when I see a shooting star.