Nude

A body.

Just, a body.

Bawdy jazz band clatters and the trumpet growls up your arms.

You manipulate childish props with poise:

Feathered-fan thigh and parasol neck.

I imagine bearded men caressing your form out of undulating stone.

Hot soft marble flowing into the shape of you, whilst your

Face looks absently skyward, lips eternally pursed;

Perched on your creamy plinth, a fixed thing.

Under all these lights as you peel off skin upon skin,

Dousing yourself with tepid champagne.

I half expect it to freeze, half to boil.

You could be a daughter of catastrophe.

Mislaid in a black and white photograph,

Your skin screeching or your form contorted and wrong,

Or piled with your brothers and sisters whilst vision blurs at the sight.

Though you could be a lost Renoir.

And museum curators must stitch your sundered form together again.

Remake your world: unfracture, uncleave.

Piece. By. Piece.

Cymbals, you bow, applause.

The stage lights dim.

You and your body leave together.

Poem for a Journeyer

The familiar or the vast, and the strange, and the new.

Environment altered and skeleton walls dressed with memories.

The seasons feel different and the sky darker blue

Though the language is the same in the murmur of the trees.

A laugh heard echoing down a long corridor,

As if you never left or maybe brought it all with you;

Until you open the curtains, seeing a different shore,

Realising that what you saw through the veil of sleep was true.

But life must be movement and nothing can be still,

Scenery shifts and props brought off and on

Against the rippling backdrop of midnight skyline and summer hill.

And we must grow and learn, not feebly looking on.

What is place but rolling road and stone?

It is voices and songs that make the world a home.

Fields of Blue

Distant shore, your music sings,
Though not to me; I hear the waves.
The ebb and flow of season tide,
The tranquil breeze and raging tempest howl.

Shimmer glint of sharp sweet waves, pushed
onward t’ward horizons tender,
New sphere of blue.
Unseen, unheard.

The ships still few as newer stars stutter past
The deep sea’s gentle tug ahead
What blue pastures lie beyond…
Did you ever see a rose the colour of the ocean?

Those Blue Remembered Hills

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the Land of Lost Content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went,

And cannot come again.
 

- A E Housman