RAINED OFF

Ah, those teenage years: what glorious Hell they were!

RAIN

I sometimes think of that day in the rain

we walked out unprepared for the downpour

yet when it came you viewed it with disdain:

you thought inclement weather was a bore.

We sheltered under trees and huddled close,

two teenagers, both still at school, so young.

You, full of life, in love, and I morose

and gloomy, powerless to hold my tongue.

My mood infected your mood that last day

and it grew cold as you heard me complain

about some lad you’d met and my dismay

that you had planned on seeing him again.

That moment, looking back, defined us then  

and afterwards we never met again.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

SCOPE FOR HOPE?

Sonnet-style, recently-written and self-explanatory ... all those hyphens!

HOPE

When all the bulwarks of our life have gone,

our property, our sanity, our health,

it seems the vestiges of hope cling on

with hope-against-the-odds our only wealth.

Though candlelight seems such a paltry thing,

the darker grows the room, the more its light

expands. It is that light to which we cling

while we endure a black, unending night.

Remove hope and the rest comes crashing down

in smithereens king’s horses could not mend.

It means so much, that short, four-letter noun:

without it, into limbo we descend.

Cling on, like moss, to hope when all else fails.

Who knows, a stroke of luck might tip the scales.

For verse of a different kind, why not visit: https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

 

PERCHANCE TO DREAM

“Happiness is waking up, looking at the clock and finding that you still have two hours left to sleep.” — Charles M. Schulz, American Cartoonist.

AWAKENING

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake,

a land-drawn fish, I struggle into day:

with otherworldly eyes, I come awake.

On feeble, unaccustomed limbs that ache,

I climb from crushed bed-sheets in disarray.

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake.

How strange it is each morning at daybreak:

the early light, the birdsong cabaret.

With otherworldly eyes, slowly I wake.

Sweet is the element I must forsake:

on waking, that safe haven slips away.

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake

into the chill of morning to remake

myself again but better in some way.

With otherworldly eyes, slowly I wake.

We speak of death as sleep for kindness sake

though dreams are bright while death is surely grey.

Reluctantly I rise from sleep’s dark lake.

With otherworldly eyes, slowly I wake.