A NECESSARY POEM

As the bloody ripples from conflict in the Middle East travel outward into all our lives, the media images grow more heartbreaking by the hour, so today's poem is presented without an accompanying picture.

THE SPARK          

Insistent broadcasters supply

grim images that horrify.

We look, aghast, then shrink away

from moving pictures that display

the carnage and brutality

that challenge our humanity.

As each hour escalates our fear,

from every tv set we hear,

young children, futures stolen, sob,

while angry voices of the mob

who, as the flames rage in the dark,

deplore the fire, forget the spark

that set alight this petrol-drum.

Preserve us and protect us from 

the wounded that wound in their turn

and celebrate as cities burn.

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

MULTICOLOURED DREAMS

This is an almost-sonnet, true enough to the form until the final couplet where, having fallen in love with the image of a child sleeping amidst the brightly coloured Lego pieces, I allowed myself a touch of poetic licence and failed to make a perfect rhyme. 

LEGO

An old man, grey and gargoyle-faced, stares down 

from a cathedral armchair to the rug

where a grandson, his game played out, lies snug,

and sound asleep, his Lego spread around.

He marvels at how suddenly the child,

as though anaesthetised, laid down his head,

no bedtime tale required, the rug his bed.

Insomniac himself, he sits beguiled   

by this small child below him on the floor,

so innocent beside his slippered feet,

and, tearful, feels that life is incomplete

without this wordless moment of rapport

with the small sleeping boy, his soft fair hair

haloed by Lego pieces on the floor.

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TWO TO TANGO

I daresay it's prudent to add a disclaimer to this sonnet, so I will. It's not autobiographical. And I don't dance. 

THE DANCE              

Some unexpected magic that first time

we met, a lively group of four or more,

drew us together, partners in some crime

not yet committed. While they took the floor,

your husband and my wife, we sat and spoke

of everything and nothing, time danced by.

It seemed that something, in us both, awoke 

and took control as we sat eye to eye.

It was as though we spoke in tongues unknown

to those around us. Suddenly we knew

that one day in the future we’d atone

for what we felt and what we’d choose to do.

The music rose and fell. We sat, entranced,

while, unsuspectingly, our partners danced.

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

HOME?

Just back from a 3-week road trip in England, with brief forays into both Scotland and Wales, I find myself questioning the concept of home, a place where one feels one belongs. 

Born in Ireland, now thirty years resident in the Channel Islands, I don't regard either place a home: one was my birthplace, the other 'the place where I live now'.   

I wrote this poem, in sonnet-style although not properly a sonnet, a few months ago and think it aptly sums up my idea of home.

                           

HOME

The Eskimo or Inuit,

it’s said, have many words for snow,

a lexicon describing it

in all it’s strange grandeur, although

they have no word for home, it seems.

For those who live nomadic lives,

home is a place beyond their dreams

and no concept of it survives 

amongst their harsh Arctic regimes.

A static man, I find the word

‘home’ one whose meaning subtly shifts:

a comfort but at times absurd,

a tombstone over which snow drifts.

For me, home is not here or there,

home is where love is. Anywhere.

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