How could a
country whose taste
in media is built
on extreme
heart-warming
sentimentality
finish up with a
nasty arsehole
like Trump?
Category: poetry
Cooked offerings
Religious festivals
are almost always
very bad news
for many animals
No room in the neurones
He who is
tired of learning
has been doing
it for seventy
three years and
needs to rest
Best time to plant a tree
In later life
you are gardening
not for yourself
but for your
successors.
Homeward bound
Just as well the house
I lived in as a child has
been demolished,
bulldozed, removed from
the surface of the planet
and replaced by two new
houses with no history.
Not that I would want
it still standing but
extensively remodeled
and modernised. No
point in that other than
it representing the spot
on the planet where
I was formed and grew.
What I want, I suppose,
is to magically return
to the functioning 1950s
house, even the 1960s.
Furniture still in place,
pictures on walls, carpets
on floors, ornaments on
shelves, books in bookcases.
And people, people in chairs,
in kitchens, watching tv,
in the garden, welcoming
the New Year, talking of
the past. A house, a home,
reconstructed, revisited,
a place I once couldn’t
wait to escape for new
adventures, new sights
and sounds, new people.
But the past is another
country, and you can’t go back.
He who
To have the last laugh
you need to be the last one
left standing. But who has the
energy for laughing then?
Values
Once upon a time
the products of high
technology – pottery,
swords, carriages,
furniture, bicycles,
wireless sets – were
valued and
treasured; kept in
good repair for
many years, decades,
passed on
from generation to
generation. Now mobile
phones, ipads, tv sets, video
games, cars, houses
even, end up in landfill
after months, days,
hours sometimes.
Fly away
All of that effort
to raise a young Magpie –
sitting on eggs for weeks,
backwards and forwards
bringing beakfuls of
juicy worms and beetles,
ends as a sad bunch of
feathers smeared across
a busy road.
Much like children
in a war zone.
Those were the days my friend
Old age comes,
finally, like the
turning on of a
spotlight, when there
is no one left alive
who knew you
as a child.
Shredded
When you look back
on your long life
it is as if every detail,
every moment, was
written on a great scroll,
and then put
through a shredder, so
that you are reduced to
picking up thin strips
of paper, each with a
phrase, a headline,
an image, unconnected
to anything else.
Good luck putting
the pieces together.
