PLAYING TRUANT

Childhood reminiscences provide ample material for verse because, it seems to me, there's something about the haziness and unreliability of memory that seems more compatible with poetry than with prose. 

THE KITE    

That truant day, I slipped away

to the Cave Hill with makeshift kite.

Fourteen years old, escaped from school,

my uniform in disarray,

absconded, not at all contrite,

I fled with mooring-string and spool,

a headstrong, heedless, wayward boy,

to fly my home-made pride and joy.

Beneath me, grey, the city spread

like scattered jigsaw pieces spilled.

Above me, hot, July sun burned

down on my bare, uncovered head.

The kite rose up with warm air filled.

I steadied it as I had learned.

It sailed, breathtakingly, above,

free, yet restrained: somehow like love.

 

FOX NEWS

"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is a pangram, a sentence that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It was commonly used for testing typewriter keyboards. Nowadays it’s used when comparing fonts.

This poem has been taken from my Facebook page where I tend to post my more lighthearted verse. You can find others of that ilk by clicking on this link https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564

ON NOT HAVING WRITTEN …

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

That fox’s acrobatic leap

over the dog, perhaps asleep,

encompasses, let’s not forget,

each letter of the alphabet:

from A to Z, all have been used.

The writer cannot be accused

of laxity or sloppy work

and yet, somehow, those nine words irk.

There’s something quite ridiculous

in being so meticulous

and one can only speculate

on how one’s ego might inflate

in having come up with that line

by accident if not design.

Well I‘m not jealous, don’t resent

such cleverness, yet I dissent

from fulsome praise, I will not cheer

this alphabetic engineer.

The line’s poetic, I’ll admit:

none could deny the writer’s wit,

and it is visually rich

and memorable, if somewhat kitsch,

but it’s not Heaney or Ted Hughes:

the writer couldn’t fill their shoes.

In truth, when I reflect upon it,

it cannot match a decent sonnet.

RUN RABBIT

The English poet, Philip Larkin, in his poem The Mower, concludes with the following lines (referring to a hedgehog killed by the titular machine) … 

Next morning I got up and it did not./ The first day after a death, the new absence/ Is always the same; we should be careful/ Of each other, we should be kind/ While there is still time.

I read Larkin’s poem years ago and suspect that it lay in the background of my consciousness when I wrote Rabbit, but mine is rather more bleak than Larkin’s poem.

Photo by Jane Mosse

RABBIT

A rabbit, dead out on the lane,

a fellow that I’ve seen before,

unmarked but dead, that much is plain:

no rabbit-running anymore.

I shoo away the buzzing flies:

no sooner done than more alight

around his mouth and dull dead eyes.

All lives have worth but are finite

and this is death, close up, no screen

of hymns or platitudes to hide

its ugliness. Unclean, obscene,

the very end of self, of pride.

 

BEING LOCAL

It's interesting that, whilst Guernsey has a considerable number of self-proclaimed poets, few of them feature the island in their writing.

Should you, dear reader, choose to travel back through the 600 plus posts on this site or seek out copies of my poetry collections, Stone Witness or A Guernsey Double, you'll find in my writing, at least, that this beautiful island is not ignored.

AT LOW TIDE

On Bordeaux’s limpet-pimpled shore

a man hunts crabs among the rocks,

a woman in a summer dress

bends in her search for sea-glass gems.

Children, oblivious to cold,

with nets and voices like small birds,

flit back and forth and never stop.

With subtle choreography

gulls scrawl on sand their arrow signs: 

this way the sea, that way dry land.

Like toys abandoned, small boats rest

lopsided, tideless, dispossessed, 

while vraic in forty shades and more

shimmers, a legion laid to waste,

its burnished armour shiny still.

A hundred thousand living things

infest small crannies, clefts and pools 

while time, suspended, holds its breath.

All that lie sleeping, death denied,

await the resurrecting tide.