Jane Dougherty's Blog, page 5

The road beneath the stars

A quadrille for dverse.

The road beneath the stars

There is no map to show the way,
no well-trod track,
nor any sun to light the way
the long road back.

I’ll walk the night, stars above
give light to see.
I’ll walk these paths we used to love,
just wait for me.

There is so little

There is so little

There is so little we can do
to change a scrap of the world for someone else,
shift the perspective, the light,

let it slant a different way,
reflecting sky and water, not traffic flow,
gold and silver among tree trunks instead of city blocks.

There is no ship that sails from me to you
with white sails billowing salty and dolphined,
seal-sung and crisp beneath spring stars,

but there are thoughts,
like hands that hold with curled fingers,
like constellations, the joined up words of stories,
told one star at a time.

Last night

Last night

Last night there were stars, a moon,
and the air was a breeze of leaf-rushing
and the calling of owls,

a movement of sound
filling our sleeping silence
like flood water.

They came in the night again, the pigs,
and rootled while we slept
and dogs slept and cats,

turning the night-damp earth
for roots and worms, working
neatly between vine rows.

If they knocked down a wild plum
laden with too much fruit,
they surely had a reason.

Ten kinds of day that I love

Ten kinds of day that I love

1.
Days that start in the soft patter of rain, the sighing of thirsty earth and the singing of a hundred birds.
2.
Days that start in the cool lowing of turtle doves on the roof, the first gold streaks firing the meadow colours.
3.
Days that start with a blue tit pecking around the window frame, nightingales among the may blossom.
4.
Days that start with dogs hurtling and leaping with joy, because eight hours separation is almost a lifetime.
5.
Days of open windows, and the only sounds the wind among the trees, blackbirds singing, a cat yawning.
6.
Days long as forever, fading into sunsets deep as space, colours from another time, ducks flying home, black silhouettes.
7.
Days that flow to an end like a stream flowing into a river, flowing to the sea, pouring over a fiery horizon.
8.
Days full of faces and muzzles, snuffle-noses and small hands, that mean as much as worlds, bright as flowers.
9.
Days of cool green and running water, meadows high with buttercups, apple trees in blossom, deer grazing among the willows.
10.
Days that start with you and end with you, and the rising of the moon.

Rain falls

The final NaPoWriMo prompt is for a contradictory sort of poem. Nothing says contradiction to me more than a cleave poem, where one side is the opposite in meaning to the other.

National poetry month day 30

Last day of Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge, and what a beautiful challenge it has been. Not a single day when the prompts have been uninspiring. Thank you, Paul and the four artists who made this possible. Please visit Paul’s blog for the images and poetry.
When writing this poem, the prompt images also brought to mind a place close to where I live, the Garonne canal, which in this case, is a stone-bounded parallel river.

Flood

The big house on the river rides the storms,
the flood waters that rise above the écluse
with fierce cries, wild white hair,
and gazes, impassive, over a landscape of bridle and bit.

The flood waters that rise above the écluse
wash away the calm and still, release the force contained
between walls, drowning the slow and the small

with fierce cries, wild white hair.
The halter shaken, alarm bells ring, but
the house with stone skirts has heard it all before,

and gazes, impassive, over a landscape of bridle and bit,
dead wood caught in high green branches,
waiting for the foaming protest to subside.

Rain

This is what came from the first set of words this morning. I think it is anyway. It’s not like the Oracle’s usual style and I don’t even remember writing it. Brain is very blurry with this thing I’ve got.

Rain

Petals open beneath the rain,
flowing into cupped flower bowls,
running over, seeping, sinking,
among root systems we never see,
too intent on the sky, the clouds, a day ruined.

Nothing seeks entertainment the way we do,
infinite technological possibilities,
and we worship only the sun,
unimaginative as potatoes, the stones in the road.

In the drip-drip of drops from glistening leaves,
bending grass stalks and the swaying heads of buttercups,
birds sing.

Come hell or fescue-high water,
birds sing, filling tree-sails,
rocking on the ocean swell of damp meadows.

Birds skim, food-questing, chick-feeding,
abseiling the slanting shafts of rain, hawk-like,
when mice scurry.

Life lives, broad and wild,
while we sit, glum, despondent,
picking through the bright insect-rapid fluttering
on a tiny screen.

National poetry month day 29

Penultimate day of Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge. You can read all the poems and see the art that inspired them on Paul’s blog here.

Perspectives

Some see in a curling wave a challenge,
a beast to be bridled and broken,
shivered excitement, trembling, every cell
submerging the small quiet murmurs of awe.

Some trawl with avid eyes landscapes
for photogenia to capture and frame,
glossing over water’s mirror-surface,
ignorant of the glinting beauties below.

Stars hang unnoticed, dimmer than neon glare,
galaxies Hubble-coloured,
are netted in Webb-capture, dazzling,
enhanced for our jaded palates.

I wonder, does the dunnock admire
a work of beauty, a creation,
a piece of turquoise sunset sky, or hear only
the beating core where a child lies curled?

The deer in the poem

For Kerfe’s random words, chosen by Oracle 2

The deer in the poem

Into the poem of weeping and wailing,
the breaching of walls, razing of cities,
a deer ambles.

In a waste of torn damask roses, their perfume
pink as sunset, against the red and orange monuments
of wind-sculpted stone, a deer stops, one hoof raised.

I silence the screaming of women,
the coarse laughter of soldiers a-glitter with bronze
in the harsh sun, and I listen

with the long twitching ears of the deer,
as the poem grows and spreads,
green and soft-shadowy.

It runs with water music, rippling with birdsong,
and the deer turns his antlered head, sniffs the evening air
and ambles into the tree-dark of the forest.

I take the clay of the poem, red as the bloody sand,
and turn it about and inside out until it shoots green
and strong.

I set it down, watch the sand blow away
in a golden wind, and pick my way through the dapples,
following in the dainty steps of the deer.

From Alulim to Zimudar

The NaPoWriMo prompt is to write a poem that is somehow connected to or is an index. I honestly don’t see how this works, and haven’t tried to emulate the example given. An index is a guide to the meanders of a text, to help the reader find her/his way, and this is what that general idea gave me, a bunch of key words, the kind you might find in an index, to help you find your way through the poem.

From Alulim to Zimudar

I could make a poem with a few glowing words,
Samarkand, cinnabar and oriflamme,
fold them like origami cranes,

let them strut the salt flats of the Euphrates,
Chalcolithic Sumer,
fly white and slender-necked the sinuous Tigris,

from Eridu to Uruk to Umma,
calling in their Akkadian accents
to the Black-Headed Ones.

I could wrap them in silks,
damasked and watered,
in all the cascading colours of Babylon’s gardens,

send them on camel-back to Trebizond
or perhaps to Maracanda,
Alexander’s Samarkand,

where this poem began,
in the glowing embers
of Phoenix fire.