SITTING DUCKS

There have been more than 200 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.
The most recent, at a Walmart shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, will probably not be the last.
Twenty-two people were killed and more than two dozen others injured after a man opened fire in Cielo Vista Mall.
The suspect, a 21-year-old man, was arrested.

 









EL PASO

Withdraw the bullets, mend the flesh.
Place back the bullets in the gun.
Return the weapon to the store.
Remove the fury from the heart.
Transform the shooter to the youth
he was before obsessive thoughts
led him, against humanity,
to spew out death like obscene words
and scatter souls like fleeing birds.

NEXT PLEASE!

Whilst it's pleasing to exceed one's three score years and ten and continue to survive, the downside is that month after month, one's contemporaries fall prey to terminal illnesses and prepare to join that great, silent majority, the dead.

 





MAKING SPACE

A sober card for sympathy:
words of condolence, trite but true ...
we write them now so frequently
as deaths of friends slowly accrue.
We cannot help but feel concern
as we grow old and wait our turn.

The world repopulates so fast
that when we’re gone we’re soon replaced
by models surely built to last,
smooth skinned, bright eyed, strong limbed, fresh faced,
that will obtain wealth, power, romance.
We can’t complain: we had our chance.

PARLIAMO ITALIANO?

One of the many talents I've not been gifted with in this life is an aptitude for languages other than English. 
My wife Jane, however, has a natural fluency in those she's chosen to learn. 

It's fair to say that, where learning a foreign tongue is concerned, she applies herself with a single-minded passion which makes my own desultory efforts appear half hearted to say the least. 

ITALIAN LESSONS

She learns her Italian online,
with earphones in.
Benvenuti
a tutti ... the rich sounds combine
like musical notes, their beauty
enthralls her, transports her gently
elsewhere.
She listens intently
and murmurs soft responses, then,
encouraged, concentrates some more,
replays a phrase,
listens again.
As chiaroscuro words outpour
her face brightens;
perhaps she feels
hot foreign soil beneath her heels.

DEFYING GRAVITY

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.

BACK TO BLACK

Despite the media rhetoric and the predictable virtue signalling of minor celebs, it isn't only plastic waste that blights our oceans.

OIL

The tide-line, like a black-edged card,
records another oil spill. 
Tarred birds, helplessly, 
their plumage black,
lie stunned,
blind eyes clogged up with glar,
as we, the volunteers,
who gather in
these sorry, broken things
and weep,
will fall, exhausted, into bed 
at close of day
but will not sleep.

DARKNESS AT NOON

Those who have had to bid a gentle farewell to a loved one when Time has finally claimed them will recognise that moment shortly before the end when surrender occurs and the claims of the world are set aside. 

CONVERSATION WITHOUT WORDS

The digits on the clock face blink.
I count each minute as I sit
beside your starched hospital bed.
Your fragile fingers interlink
with my strong digits. Words unsaid
travel between us. You emit
no sounds apart from rasping breath 
in this room, unembellished, stark,  
and yet there is disclosure here.
I sense that you now welcome death,
that somehow you have ceased to fear
that endless falling through the dark.
   

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME

Such heedless creatures we were as children: animalistic in our approach to life, each day a new beginning and Time a matter of no concern.
How different it seems now.

DANDELION CLOCKS

As children, we scattered them
not caring where they flew or fell
and thought we measured Time itself.

I count them now, this season’s crop,
each puff-ball head, each milky stem.

Uncut, run wild, they flourish well
that white-haired mob, unlike myself,
who dreads the moment time will stop.