Our Love

I realised that I should have posted this poem on my Granny, Tenessa's  birthday - 31st July, so I am backdating this  post from 5th August. 

Not for nothing
did the love that we have known
last all these years.
It is no small thing -
though we be small -
the force that flashed between us
and went on.

Unattenuated by the law
of the inverse square
which gutters light
and is the quenching maw
of the magnetic spectrum,
our little fondnesses
which modulate love's carrier wave
are taken in an instant,
with no reference to velocity,
outwards in quantum leaps
to the very rim of time.

Any lovers anywhere
could tap and live our love
with just a prayer,
a suitable antenna,
and perhaps a flair
for frequency.

No!
It is no small thing,
our love,
our spiralling,
eternal
love.

For Tenessa Catherine Harvey Irvine Oliphant  1920 - 2006

The Worker

I am as free as any slave
to think my thoughts and write
my hidden poems. I am free
to dream the dreams I dream
with my own inner voice.

And you my masters are as tied
to me as I to you. Do you
still watch for evidence of the soul?
What do you think you buy when you
buy me? How free is free?
And sirs, how free are you?

Drumchapel Bus Queue

That's me since yisterday.
Nutta thing done,
weans waashed nur nuthin.

Uch it's him.
Comes stoatin in last night
foosa puggie.
Murawckulus!

Voamits aw nght
owra side i the bed.
Spewins aw owra carpet.

Fun's fun says I,
bit get yir erse
affy the pulla.

Nenna smoarnin.
Heed lik a sterrheed.
Mooth fulla hoarses shite.
Noa good wurd fur anybiddy.
Think it wis ma faut.

See Setturday.
Hate it.

Two Trees

Two trees in the garden,
rowan side by side with oak.

They have grown together,
roots inextricably twined,
branches so interlaced
the proper season seems to produce

the berried oak,
the acorned rowan,

the shield each other from the wind
and share the rain. At a lost limb
the phantom fingers of the amputee
still feel the itch of the other's
shivering proximity.

His rising sap inflames
her bright capillaries.

She sheds her crimson benison
around his feet. He feeds her acorns.

Each brings the other to perfection-
perfect spirit of tree
which occupies the space of both,
oakrowan, rowanoak.

Morning

There is a narrow vacuum where all
that stays of the night's dreaming is
an aftertaste of faint emotion,
and what is yet ahead is yet
inadequately seen. Between
these poles a crystal emptiness
where my awareness hangs upon
the brief security of not-knowing.

But gradually the phial fills
with yesterday's foreboding
and panic at the world's encroach.
My arms reach out; blind fingers feel
for some familiar reassuring braille,
and find your well-remembered warmth
beside me warming the unbidden clay.
I wake to you, wake to the smiling day.

Meditation

I sat
And sought
The tree-ness
Of the tree
And found the tree's
Own search to be
The me-ness
Of the me.

Candle

The knives of the night are out
and you beyond the stockade,
alone, afraid,
trapped, wrapped about,
lost among your childhood's
secret latitudes.

And I, fearful for you,
aching lonely for you,
light this poem,
place it in the window.

When you come back
You shrug it out.

Ophelia OD (spoken in the poet's own voice)

Final Communication

I swore that
when I died
I'd move the halls
of heaven and hell
to struggle back
and tell my loved ones
how I'd fared.

I hadn't bargained
on being changed
so much by freedom
especially
freedom from
the self.

If I went back,
who would I say
I was?

Forgiveness

A curtain corner raised,
I witnessed Jews,
enlightened since their passage
through the Auschwitz ovens,
rescuing former camp guards
from the stinking pits
remorse had dug for them.

I bring it to your attention
you bombers, you famine makers,
you adjusters of populations.
These children you kill
might learn, by this light,
a love which, brought to bear,
could drive you screaming mad.

Goodness Is a Tender Plant

Saw need and felt
The quick compassion.
Took two steps forward
Arms outstretched.
Blundered,
Was accused,
Stepped back,
And never ventured more
Into another's mess.

Viewpoint

You look along the planes
of your life, backwards
and forwards, seeing
its contours, fitting
the pieces together
in elevation.

See it from above
looking downwards
at the plan, seeing
it all of a piece,
a piece perhaps
in another's jigsaw.

Poet in a Hurry

I am a poet in a hurry,
impatient to disgorge
my torrents
before they shall be damned
by the stilting
of the brain's dead cells;

furiously engaged
lest insiduous senility
shall staunch my streams;
enraged
by atrophy's encroach
upon the channel's purity.

Verse is my emetic,
the enema prescribed
to precede parturition,
and, in defiance of
the last prostatic twitch,
my aphrodisiac.

Ungrateful God

Men demolished mountains
for the stone,
cut down forests
for the wood,
made cathedrals.

God fled to the wilderness,
did what he loved best:
lived on a mountain top,
looked at trees.

The Word

The word is the symbol,
imperfectly deciphered
by the intellect.
Its aptness and its force,
even its beauty, is
as much a matter of
association as exegesis.
Communication honed
on evolution's wheel
may ultimately make
the spoken word redundant.
I shiver for your cold,
you weep for my sorrow,
each bleeds for the other's wound,
and language has become
a rapport of sentient silence.

Together

We soon learned how to walk
together, arm-in-arm,
without the wobbling loss
of sync, and the people came
to think of us as us
not you and me.

And you, bearing our baby
in your womb, and I
perhaps not too
efficiently,
but with the right intent,
bearing you both in mine.