Sky Above
Sky above.
Light pouring down.
The world spirit
blowing through.
Earth below,
resting on rock.
Sky Above
Poems
Light Breaks
Bandits
Two shadows,
at three in the morning,
their faces masked,
shifty in the moonlight,
slip soundless over snow,
as they move towards
the bird feeders.
They huddle together,
forming a darker patch.
I watch the feeders move,
but cannot see the seed
nor hear it as it falls.
The feeders empty,
they move again
towards the back porch,
climb the steps,
and settle once more.
I know that by morning,
all traces of seed will be gone,
devoured by Dyson and Hoover,
scavengers and professional
seed removers.
Comment: Light Breaks
“Light breaks where no sun shines…” but sometimes it takes a long time to happen. The name of my blog is rogermoorepoet and it’s main function is to showcase my poetry, above all, to my friends and followers. In my efforts to publish in print form, I have neglected to pay attention to the main function of this blog – poetry. Why? Because when I submit poems I always find the phrase – ‘must be unpublished – including on social media’! So I stopped publishing poetry on my poetry blog and on other social media. Okay, okay. I know. I am an idiot. BUT – light has now broken where no sun shone – Dylan Thomas, of course, another Swansea Boy, and as of today poetry is back. A big thank you to any and all who have been waiting for its return. Give me some encouragement – let me know if you like what I am doing – paintings and poetry!
Deer, oh dear!
Deer, oh dear!
Deer
sitting here watching the deer
wandering through the garden
five six seven ten
never seen so many
twelve fifteen
a caravan
a convoy
one behind the other
walking in their footsteps
following on
so silent
then
ears pricked
turning watching listening
existential
here long before us
forever following old trails
knowing each change
each new direction
a connection
between us
and how it had been
for thousands of years
before we came here
to disturb them
Swansea
Swansea
To be Welsh in Swansea is to know each stop on the Mumbles Railway: the Slip, Singleton, Blackpill, the Mayals, West Cross, Oystermouth, the Mumbles Pier. It’s to remember that the single lines turn double by Green’s ice-cream stall, down by the Recreation Ground, where the trams fall silent, like dinosaurs, and wait, without grunting, for one to pass the other. It’s to read the family names on the War Memorial on the Prom. It’s to visit Frank Brangwyn in the Patti Pavilion and the Brangwyn Hall. It’s to talk to the old men playing bowls in Victoria Park. It’s to know that starfish stretch like a mysterious constellation, at low tide, when the fishnets glow with gold and silver, and the banana boats bob in the bay, waiting to enter harbour, and the young boys dive from the concrete pipes without worrying about pollution. But when the tide turns, the Mumbles Railway has been sold to a Texan, the brown and yellow busses no longer run to Pyle Corner, Bishopston, Pennard, Rhossili, sweet names of sand and tide, where my father’s ghost still fishes for salmon bass, casting its lines at the waves as they walk wet footprints up the beach to break down the sand-castle walls I built to last forever at Brandy Cove and by the Slip on Swansea sands.
A Season of the Heart
A Season of the Heart
Here in the autumn of my life,
surrounded by the fruits of my labours,
filled with the accumulated wisdom of years,
surrounded by solitude, yet confronted
by fall’s splendour and the harvesting
of so many golden days, collected
and gathered in, safe from winter’s storms.
Old friends from years gone by move
restless through the mists of time
that hide so many things, while revealing
others in the sunbeam’s spotlight
that marks with a sudden enlightenment
the meaning of something I thought
I had lost, yet that still lingers, a shadow
on the mind-wall of memory’s cave,
where firelight flickers and brings things
back to life, magic moments released
from time’s spell and paraded before me,
here, where no bitterness dwells
in the sweetness of remembered time.
Movement
Movement
Incoming tide, a sparkling sea,
waves dancing beneath the sun,
white-maned ponies prancing.
Summer light changing as a cloud
moves its shadow over meadows
where cows graze, their advance slow,
gentle their movements, browsing.
Autumn wind, the dry leaves
casting a red-gold rainfall
over the lawn, shuffling along,
in time to the whispered wind song.
Silent, the deer, soundless as they move
through the trees at garden’s foot,
walking the tight-rope edge
dainty, between kempt, and wild.
Click for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Movement
Silence
Silence
Words emerge from the silence
of wood and stone. They break
that silence when they are born.
Silence, once broken, cannot
be repaired. A word once spoken
cannot be recalled.
The greatest gift is to know
how to be alone amidst the crowd,
how to sink into silence.
A world of words smothered
at birth and that world, unborn,
dismissed, forgotten, still-born.
A lost world of words whirled
on the silent wind that fans
the unborn fire within you.
The spider web of the mind
blown clear by the wind
that blows unspoken words.
The sultry silence of wood and stone,
the hush of the tadpole swimming
into its own metamorphosis.
Click for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Silence
Fall Migration
Fall Migration
Standing in the sun, watching the leaves
scuttling, skittering over the grass,
listening to the trees, their dry tongues,
chittering autumnal rumors of geese
preparing to fly, their movements,
as they gather, in accord with patterns
hard-wired genetically into their minds.
Animate, they are, and more than that
they are animated by ancestral spirits
that grace grass and water, walking,
delicate, between stark trees, calling,
always calling ‘away, away’.
We too are called, called to follow
the geese on their sky-way high-ways,
where their arrow-heads point us all
along the star paths
of their migrant nocturnal ways.
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor.
Fall Migration
Circles
Circles
Secret and sacred,
this shadow world that walks
naked in the inner chambers
of the mysterious mind.
Here, in the valley,
surrounded by whaleback hills,
the horizon limited by fir and fin,
I live without limits
beneath a limitless sky.
Dream boats sail above me
on a sumptuous azure sea
and I am a mammal,
feet rooted in the soil, dwelling
at the bottom of a sea of air.
Mysterious, the circles
weave their cycles –
sunrise to sunset,
moonrise to moonset –
and in my dreams
a photo of the rising earth
seen from a cyclical satellite
we call the moon.
Day of the Dead
Day of the Dead
writing by candlelight
the flickering flame
casting shadows
over thought and word
tell me what are shadows
but the false promises
festering in Plato’s Cave
or a fake finger show
projected on an unwilling wall
yellow and red the flames
sweet scented the smoke rising
from melting wax
my mind alive with memories
this night of nights
when family ghosts
drift through the room
and my childhood clutches
the red bag of my heart
with death’s cold fingers
Click here for Roger’s reading on Anchor
Day of the Dead
rogermoorepoet 