24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Ever wonder
how a tree
grows? It
makes no sense;
not like baking a
cake or building a
guitar.
A couple of
peach pits,
tossed
out the window,
and then, one day,
without even trying,
there’s a damn
tree
full
of
peaches.
Who cares
She told me no one cared about the two of us
Boring, she said. The struggles, the compromises.
how we learned so very painfully to listen
The way laughter slowly replaced anger
and the present outlived our pasts
No, she told me. No one wants to hear it.
I pointed to the words of another traveller
a woman whose name still rings silver
through halls so sacred. at least to someone
She gets it, I countered. A shrug. Dismissed.
But I insist: I will record how you lay in the floor
to charm me out of bitterness, my curses melting
into fragile hope. How you gave me a year
and how it grew like a many-trunked banyan tree
each trunk another year, another life explored.
Now, you are ash and memory. Like the earth
beneath that banyan tree. So I send these
words into the void, where hope still wars
with anger and despair, and I do not care
about those others, those she said will not care.
I’ve never been one to like a group project,
So now it hardly seems fair,
The one thing I want most in the world,
Requires another person there.
you are not supposed
to stop loving me
aren’t we to last a while longer
sitting in rocking chairs
reminiscing and holding hands
kissing by moonlight
as it beams on our wrinkled brows
you are there still tucked in my heart
I saved a special place for you there
until we meet again in that other universe
will my love fade away
forget-me-nots in my garden
still sing the blues
Connection
Will I be content to stay this way?
Or will I take the difficult path to connect?
With you, unperfectly perfect for me
Let’s commit together
Or will I take the difficult path to connect?
It is always tempting to remain an island
Let’s commit together
For we can offer ourselves as one
It is always tempting to remain an island
An island of selfishness and fear
For we can offer ourselves as one
One of the many, but one of our hope
An island of selfishness and fear
We can sail with our connection
One of the many, but one of our hope
After forty years, I am sure
We can sail with our connection
With you, unperfectly perfect for me
After forty years, I am sure
to be content to stay this way for more
Two worlds in juxtaposition
Living separate lives but bound by a thread
Invisible, fragile, sharpened by years
To cut through life’s griefs
To bind and enable.
Will it last, will it last?
Will it endure the test of time?
Or shall it shatter
In a rainbow of emotions
Some exquisite, some fatal.
to care and love
with open hearts
to stay beside
with open minds
to love’s embrace
we beckon on
The earth is a sleeping pig,
stinking,
boiling,
blunted,
blinking,
sourly computing every sound
in the blinding quiet.
The earth is a precious child.
We must attend to every sigh.
Rien de plus …
There is nothing more or else or other.
No other life space.
I corn’t spayk
I stand amazed.
April said she’d chum me
to a safer space,
side-eyeing all poisoned water,
and wholesale greenwashing.
Data is the root of all evil here.
‘Hauld yer wheesht, hen’
’We will replant sea grass
in Scotland’s coastal verges
but blindly dredge untouched ocean floors
for lithium,
sustaining daily prattle’.
’Scanny, she’s one for overthinking,
rendered inactive, without a clue,
Doollally tap’.
‘We must reap what we must sow’.
The great forest murmers
a global whisper
embracing in loose-limbed connection
across the piggery.
Author: ©️Jane Eckford
2nd September 2023
She’s had her eyelashes tinted
I felt shocked and disoriented.
It sounded like a reckoning in my ear
North, south, west, east, there and here.
Even if I decided to shut my ears –
to all head-scratching, the ear hears.
I sat quietly, musing on the repercussions
of her mood oscillations.
Seemingly the following day
I might lose sight, NAY!
It seems my head was below my legs
As shadow lurks around the eggs.
I had already failed to write a piece
Perhaps my only peace isn’t her peace.
I could have pitied my piety
but I wasn’t fully conversant with the way she conversed.
So her last word went like a sword
Look at me bleeding in a surgical ward
Should I fix the holy hand brake?
Or I should keep bearing the folly of heartbreak?
Write a poem from the perspective of an object
pov: negative covid test on dining room table
i wonder if they’ve forgotten about me
or if i’ve just been here long enough to become
permanent fixture or maybe decoration
kin to the dried flowers rescued from the neighbors trash
in mason jar vases, surrounded by a thin layer of dust
wonder if i will become dusk dusted
here
in a landfill
or in the sea