Csardas

Thistledown days drifted adagio on the tide,
each infant moment a luxury of forgetfulness,
each childhood year a chasm of lost enchantments,
Lush with time, we have drunk our fill of nepenthe.
Silken days, when the warp tensed to infinity,
danced a saraband of sleep, sighed softly in the sun,
watched a feather unwind its solitary gyre.
Spindrift days heard the sea breathe upon the shore,
heavy with years and the crush of tiny shells.
Oozy days slid dolce far niente to the horizon.

We are only mayflies,
ruffling the lace
of a cosmic web,
Twitchy with urgency,
we fear to wake
the spider.
He holds the threads
with furred palps,
Deathless he waits,
passionless, patient.
Once enmeshed,
we strain against
the tension, we feel
the agony of
fate unbound.
Bodies dissolve,
minds sucked dry,
spirits strewn
across the decades.
We are threshed,
flailed, winnowed.
We are stretched
thinner and frailer
on the wind.

Da capo or fine

Miss Groser's Legacy

I walk in pleasurable solitude,
(pineapple mayweed, scarlet pimpernel)
inhaling the wild jewels of childhood.
(bugloss, bugle, butterburr, borage)
I do not consciously identify them,
(rose-bay willowherb, biting stonecrop)
but, insinuating through synaptic fire,
(sun spurge, honesty, kidney vetch)
they come, crowding to be known.
(red campion, red dead-nettle, red valerian)
She could never have imagined
(germander speedwell, birdsfoot trefoil)
that, nearly half a century on,
(ivy-leaved toadflax, mouse-ear hawkweed)
her classroom severity long forgotten,
(coltsfoot, cow parsley, spotted catsear)
I could retain the gift of naming -
Miss Groser supreme.

Life Maths

In the bright array of childhood,
I was a whole complex number,
a self-sufficient integer,
sequencing the hours,
stretching my roots to infinity.
Adding friends and experiences
formed my personal algorithm.
I became a function of society.

But life is a subtraction.
Each death diminishes me
by the sum of all their days.
The coefficients of survival
pair a mathematical progression
of ever decreasing terms.
I darken by reduction
to my final vanishing point.

Janissaries of the Castellan

She breathes with the waves,
quietly in, quietly out.
Dry-mouthed, defenceless,
she tries to focus beyond
the missing. The horizon
ripples, pacific, tranquil,
but she feels them coming.
Hooves menace the periphery.

Shard castles, their blackened
crenellations skewering the sky,
shimmer at the edge of vision.
Foundations retch.
Sun-splintered scimitars fracture
the air, there is no purview
left untouched.
Split-blind she bows her head.

Ten thousand Janissaries,
with whetted blades
and saw-edged purpose,
chisel the air
to jittery polyhedra.
She shivers, spitted
on the jags of indifferent pain.
There can only be submission.

The Crystalline Entities

Adamantine, obdurate, stubborn,
cherishing the shards
of yesterday's discord,
they smoulder in separate rooms.

Stiff-backed,
one tries to read the paper.
Vertiginous words disassemble,
she is still spinning with anger.

Schismatic, dissident, rebellious,
the fractured sounds have
power to soothe and
rock the daughter to calm.

Laser-softened,
contrite, her touch pierces
maternal armour,
declares truce with a kiss.