Hour Three: black beans

Haricots noirs
Pois chiches
They sit quietly
On the shelf
Waiting to be
Turned around
And then someone
To be turned on
By chick peas
And black beans.
Smaller tins
Might have been
Better when they
Were bought
Back in two
Thousand and
Seven.
Sept.

The eagle sees all

You know when you
look for something
the thing you see
is almost certainly
the thing that it is not.

Not today. It swooped
and soared taking
a perch on a higher
branch of a tree at
the water’s edge.

Me and my loved one
looking, craning. We
had followed its flight
path. Now to find it.
“That’s a branch,”

my loved one, laughed.
“That’s not it either, Dad.”
(Oh to hear that name
called.) Then we saw it,
and upon seeing it we

could not look back.
We won’t look back.
If the eagle is freedom
and freedom is sweet,
sweet freedom is ours.

A little bird told me.
I know it when I see it.

Hour One: The Day After the Bomb Went Off

The morning, silent and still,
betrayed the overwhelming
fact that a bomb
had gone off,
leaving those who planned

for this ominous event, for
years, and those who were
caught, after years
of complacency
and self-denial, to marvel
at its occurrence and to plot

the contours of the shadow
that the plume of this
destruction
would have
on future years.

As a dinosaur must have said
whilst viewing the meteor
hurtling to
an innocent earth:
“How the hell will this work out?”

How in the hell indeed.

Um Aah Okay, So Anyway

Um aah okay, so anyway.

These are the words I heard today.

The little bits of verbal glue we use

to hold the bricks of conversation

together.

Together – as we are meant to be.