Tag: summer

more perseids

moon and cloud

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.
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“just one more”

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.

roses

I remember a summer evening

when you brought me roses,

full-blown, blowzy,

stolen from a neighbour’s garden.

I laughed, 

and listened to your promises

as you crushed the falling petals

underfoot.

Originally published in The Coffee House, Issue 10, 2003.

The old poem is included mainly as accompaniment to the photo, which I wanted to include to add some colour to the page after a number of fairly wordy posts. However, now I’m here and on the subject of roses…
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July heat

This piece has been in my drafts file/notebook for years and has never really seemed to ‘gel’*. Still, given its provisional title, if I don’t post it today, I might end up waiting another year before I decide to do anything with it.

July

Heat swells to stuff the corners
of the room, tucking itself up
to pad the picture rail, deadening
the walls. We lie at the edges
of a king-sized bed, white cotton
smooth beneath us. You reach across
and touch me. Sweat breaks
under the weight of your hand.

 
 
(*perhaps if it weren’t so hot in Spain in the summer, things would gel better, but when the writer herself feels as if she’s melting, it’s not that easy to concentrate and get poetry to its final setting point.)

madrid heat

I had to make a quick visit to Madrid yesterday to sign some papers, but fled back to the village as quickly as I could. A considerable amount of the time I was in the city was actually spent travelling on the metro.

This poem dates from at least six years ago, but I remembered it as the air-conditioning on the metro doesn’t seem to have improved at all.

Fat Woman on the Metro

Her fan is silk and lace – a butterfly
whose coloured wings flick
and furl coquettishly. Crimplene
caresses curves as tenderly
as any lover’s hand; she wears pearls
of sweat at wrist and neck.