For Helen and Harry He stared with care as fish swam towards him in an alchemy of welcome. Bubbles circled fish, a plastic diver, and a mermaid’s chair – until silently bursting into air. His daughter – mother of his grandchildren – played fragments of half-remembered tunes, letting fingers find paths along the keyboard of […]
Category: Poems (Page 1 of 3)
I bought you tulips in Cambridge market and, for no good reason, thought to mark it with a smile to all who passed me by as I walked from Market Hill to home. Welcoming eyes down Trinity Street and smiles for all on Magdelene Bridge, each one with a happy echo, and so, at Kettles […]
True Stories, NCI Club, January 2026 Once upon a time On hard plastic chairs with all the comfort of the rack I crossed my legs to ease my painful back and waited…. We watched a slender, older woman watching us. She let our attention settle, and began her tale. She had crawled through potholes, dragging […]
For almost a millennium, when all their deeds that would be done were done, the island brought its people here to bury them. Now, fifty years since mourners sang their final sorrows, the chapel’s wooden roof has fallen in on generations of loss. In the graveyard, bones bed shallowly on carboniferous rocks and, above, flat […]
They appeared by our kitchen window, some sombrely on foot, others in more cars, we thought, than were on the island. At the front, a green van had been repurposed as an adequate hearse. At the rear, hurried two mopeds and a bike. Give or take, the whole island was there. With my hands in […]
How do you speak to me?
With what occult science and hidden roses
do you address the crystals in my heart?
On Brighton’s pebble beach, patrolled by seagulls,
two women sat in white linen.
Father and son play Gnaoua music
In what was once a palace.
The clue is in the title
A reflection on…
…well read it and decide