Skip to main content

White Hawthorns

The day speaks of white hawthorn Sundays
Long washed out road trips, reluctant relatives
waving you off on arrival.

Rain from decades passed,
a swishing of glimpses.
Parents cramped and fretful.
Passing through a littered accompaniment
of faceless outlines.

Stretched out warming children, car sick,
scrunch up weathered newspapers.
Pungent smells of nostalgia,
almost Springs
bouncing forward hours.

Eager sweet wrappers lunge
for half opened windows
to adorn the floating blossom clouds
of hawthorn bushes,
March’s winds step in
much like a bone-chilled
but amiable hitch hiker.

A querulous sibling rolls over, sickening,
falls out in a screeching of tires.
Tearfully rain-splattered.

Another weekend pulled out and pegged up,
redolent of adolescences quickly traversed.

Mark Ereira-Guyer

Currently Popular Poems:

Forever Searching

Search the walls Scan the corridors Express the highs Scribble the lows Writing explores The state of my mind.   Judith  

Twisted Love

Twisted trunk and milky stream, A glacial meltwater on serpent skin. Whirling optimistic messengers, Coherent and flowing, Yet random and broken Waiting to be spoken. Snake bark maple, And milky stream, Twisted love and shattered dreams. Anon .    

In the Skip of the Moon

In the skip of the moon I felt my life lighten, Held between worlds, Drifting slowly to the shore. Fathomed to the flow, Secure in the depths Of the hidden undertow Revealing it’s current. Dragged along, The awakening of freshwater To the spit of Orford, I swam ashore. April

After a Week Off

Sarah, new to the ward, senses a friend in Nurse Nicole as she sits at the end of the bed, eyes closed and dread of the operation lessens; she knows that all will be well as trust replaces fear. Some of the other nurses bitch she doesn't fill forms properly she only washes her own cup but Matron squashes their cattiness jealousy can run rampant unless quickly curtailed. The doctors are pleased she is back some appreciate their task will be easier as her soothing hands find the place that needs reminding it is part of the whole and is free to join in the healing. Karen

Becalmed

I can no longer dot the i’s, nor cross the t’s. A pale haze, like Sunday afternoons, pleasant after a glass of wine too many, drifts across my day. I am at peace. I find myself disposed to acquiesce, content to live life at this gentle pace, content, it seems, with how life’s focus, now diminished, takes on the softened blur of evening light. Something sharp is lost. But the time for mourning it is done. The wind that swelled the sails has dropped, the tide recedes, the fierceness of the sun is quenched, leaving the sunshine’s golden glow that speaks the lateness of the hour. A taste of salt upon my lips - no call for worry or regrets - a bitter-sweet recall of what has gone. Julia Duke

Seasons

To each a season: the planets Turn in Kepler's gyre, Swelling the mental weather, Fattening the wealth Of light and dark I weekly Feel in my own solitude. To each a season: a death Of what was hard and cold: A burst of sun to break My hoary sadness And gild the shining tower I build around your smile. But let's not talk of sun But speak instead of life And all the things I feel When living through mortality. The lovely times We feast and meagre times We only feed on memories. I have my seasons. Tim Holt-Wilson

Change

As  I stand with my feet in the ocean, and look at the setting sun, I think of how many me's, have stood in how many seas, but always stared at the same one. A snapshot of scenes in the movie of me, at various times of my being. A new version of me every single time; the same star I'm always seeing. It fills me with curious wonder, for the places that I may go; And the life that has yet to happen, and the things I have yet to know. Jess

So Much Yellow

There’s gorse, of course and sometimes broom, the lichens yellow on the tomb and every churchyard has its fill of lovely yellow daffodils. There’s dandelions and celandine and yellow primrose, I suppose, and fluffy yellow chicks are born and yellow toads from slippery spawn. And green is seen on every lawn, at April’s end the woods turn blue and tulips bloom in pink and red with drooping leaves in every bed but yellow bellows all around: spring’s mating call, a joyful sound. Julia Duke

Leper Chapel - Screams from the Past

Ghost-like stones Of crumbled chalk And forgotten dreams: A leper screams. Lost limbs and Fallen faces: Nuns and monk’s graces Lost to leprosy. Condemned to the chapel: Painful screams, Disfiguring disease In Eleventh Century. A prosperous port To Dunwich they came, Outside Pales Dyke -The fortified ditch. Fragments of columns, Wind-worn capitals And carved Caen stone: Soulless shadows alone. Sandstone arches Guarding unearthly silhouettes Of threatened and isolated lepers Forbidden to work. Medicinal monk-fussing ointments Of hemlock, henbane and mandrake. Preparing for surgery, Opium alerts and vinegar-dabbed faces. Herbs soothing bacteria progressing; Curved sandstone arches Clasping the ghost-like shadows, Echoing the delicate gloom. Stephanie

Shingle Beach

Deep Yellow sea poppies With Salted horns Of sickle-shaped pods Grey green lobes Waxy Rosettes Clinging to the shingle And Fragility of life. Thomas