Two Stoned Poems

Stones Circle


Like nomads at the vernal equinox
my stones grow restive.  I'll double-lock
their shed!  I've a life's work there,
catalogued and safely stabled.
But you can't squeeze gratitude from stone
when the thrust of bud and time
unlocks their wanderlust.
There's my footloose granite, anxious to be gone;
quartz nursing itchy feet;
irascible old pumice, rotten
with travel bug. Batch of globe trotters!
They'd cluster, cheek by jowl
on common beaches. So while they plot
I'll crouch at the keyhole, alert
to the changing tempo of their rumbles.
At all costs I'll fence that huge momentum.
Feckless collection!  I've offered them a roost,
an end to voyaging.  And yet, like madmen
furious in asylums whirl, they roll
and roll and spurn their meals of moss.




Doubts in Limestone Country


The compass memory hesitates between
a sense of longing and of not belonging
in other shires. Stone walls?  Stone sheep enscribed
in strata mapped like ribs of half-ploughed bone
beneath the torn edge of an autumn sky?
Or chalklands perfect as the shoulders
of girls asleep through afternoons
of slanting rain, all their misgivings blurred
in the first unfocussed signatures of love?
Bone, shoulder, reassemble.  Choose.
The needle locks.  The traveller no more
can set his charts of time or place, or force
a pathway through his self-,deceit,
wanders and doubts his craft.
Rib or shoulder?  Shoulder or bone break?
Doubts like a lodestone with its instinct snapped.
.

Carol From an Island Without Trees

These are tunes of empty weather,
the sky too much a brawl
for wing and feather, rain
to corrode the vestiges of summer,
the Atlantic ransacking all.

Sing of a loveless island swept
by unlovely weather,
shoreline of grey and ochre where
one seabird sprawls and slides
from citadel to citadel of gale.

Weather for beak and claw,
not wing and feather,
that gongs in sea-caves,
raves of the ended summer
and nothing done, and this
is the end of singing weather.

Then the song, like wing and summer,
like love and feather, is gone.