Secret Garden
Silent,
the children,
disappeared now,
hiding in their secret places.
So swift,
all our childhoods,
snatched suddenly away.
Only the echoes remain,
clinging like birdsong to branches,
fading slowly,
as an ever more distant past
trickles like water or sand
through the open
net of our clutching hands.
Kingsbrae 25.4
25 June 2017
Middens by Jarea
Garbage dumps they are to us,
filled with childhood treasures,
shaped flints, arrowheads, spear
tips, scrapers for deer hide,
so many castaway items.
Garbage dumps to us, maybe,
but for the Passamaquoddy
who first settled this area
and lived on this shore,
these precious middens
are anything but dumps.
They are guide posts,
lighthouses in the moonlight,
signposts to point the way
for wayfarers and wanderers,
at high tide, low tide,
and especially when the mudflats
bathe beneath sun and moon
and the channels twist and turn,
serpentine labyrinths in their wanderings.
Garbage: we dig up what they have left,
expose past lives to scientific theories,
and destroy their navigational knowledge,
the science they left behind.
Kingsbrae 25.2
25 June 2017
Mist at Jarea
Moving in with the tide,
drawing gauze curtains
over the islands,
climbing, so silent,
pebbles and rocks
to arrive at our windows
and block out the sun.
The mist’s grey face
presses against the panes.
Long lost friends,
come back to haunt us,
loom out of our past.
They bear memories
born beyond the mist,
living now in, and for, this mist.
They come stalking us and tap
with long, cold wisps of fingers
at locked windows and doors,
bolted so they can’t get in.
Kingsbrae 22.3
22 June 2017
Old Sow
The good luck ship
flies its Jolly Roger
and all is well with the world.
No pirates now
bury their treasure
on Oak Island,
nor skirt the Old Sow
as she sucks away
at the ocean depths..
Porpoise and whale
come to her feeding grounds,
milking the maelstrom
she churns up from her seas.
Warm is her welcome
to travelers brave
who test their courage
on her swirling waves.
Kingsbrae 22.2
22 June 2017
Lupins
To dwell here
is to build
cloud castles
or castles
in Spain.
High-ramparted,
the clouds,
sky-sheep
wind-driven
across a blue field.
Here,
no sound but the breeze
rippling the pond,
leaving soft footsteps
as its cat’s paw
bats at trailing branches.
Lupins,
in bank and ditch,
sway to the wind’s soft voice.
Toe-tapping, head tossing,
they play a jazz and blues concert
to a chorus of yellow bells.
Kingsbrae 21.3
21 June 2017
Wollemi Nobilis
To see you on this day,
the summer solstice,
when time and the sun
stand still,
is to recall you as relictus,
then to acclaim you
as Lazarus,
risen from the dead.
Your fossil footprints
walked for so long,
two hundred million years,
and you walked with them,
unknown, unrecognized,
lost in the wilderness.
What poverty in language:
we either describe you
in impossible scientific Latin
or else we reduce you
to a chocolate coco pops
breakfast cereal.
Hand-cuffed, chained,
your feet rooted within
this immobile crockery pot,
you will never leave us now.
You are your own solstice,
a stationary seed,
growing to adulthood,
sown in a circle
of never-ending time.
Comment: I have been trying since Sunday, 5 March 2017, to write this poem. But what are four months in the life of a seventy-three year old poet or a pine tree that was thought to have become extinct 200 million years ago. I do not have the words to express how I feel looking at this throwback to the time of the Dinosaurs. And maybe that is how this poem should start for it is, after all, Wordless Wednesday … “I do not have the words …” and thoughts, too, jam in the brain and refuse to cycle, let alone re-cycle. So, I’ll leave this poem for now. That said, I will probably come back to it. Meanwhile, do I ever feel so absolutely, totally, and completely inadequate.
Kingsbrae 21.2
21 June 2017
Carpe Diem
Leos love this longest day.
Their sunshine manes
just swell and ripple
with a lion’s pride.
They lick their lips with joy
at the thought of sun,
and yet more sun;
finger-licking good,
this ice-cream warmth
spilling over from sugar cones
that march past in their memories.
Carpe diem
seize the day, indeed:
for tomorrow brings less sun,
and every day thereafter
sunlight grows less and less
until the frosty stars appear,
Orion thrusts his stormy
sword above the horizon,
and snow men
with their yellow feet
stand stock steady
on the lawn.
