Being Bardi

Verdant

Each Spring
has its own shade of green.
The Spring
she died did not change that.
Or the rain
or the Sunshine
or anything

but the colourless space left in my heart.
That only hopes there will be a Spring
with her shade of green
where she will not be dead. 

rags

Lovers and dreamers
and other truths and lies.
they come and go without knowing
they are each of them their own book.
Only waiting the feel of the rag content and
the scent of the pages as they turn, the
pages that are full
of lovers and dreamers.

15 April,1945

Regardless of all the myths and legends
and monsters we have created under the bed,
nobody was ready for this.
A world which suddenly smelled of pain and ash and blood.
bodies stacked upon each other as if they were
bad sentences in a story of horror without end.

Death city after death city uncovered
in the Spring of Hell returning home
this time at east. The bodies wrapped around
each other in stillness.
And the skeletons walking slowly, slowly
and finding the one word they had thought impossible.

the possibility of Tomorrow.

Loving Cup

Live as a child is a series of adventures
that we both remember and forget depending
on where life and dreaming leaves us off.
scattered in the tall trees and high blossoms
had been houses, come and gone over the centuries.
on weekends we would shuffle through bracken looking
for the impact of civilisation on the mountains.
One weekend we were cowboys and indians chasing each other
through famous battles when we say a glistening.

Buried in the dark loam was a loving cup. An old design
with lettering only vague by now.
An award won by someone or such decades ago at least.
It was Paddy decided the mountain deserved the trophy.

I had wondered if he ever won a trophy on his own.
Although later I heard he did not return from the Falklands.

Lately I have been thinking of the load and forests and the
cool mountains and the treasure hunts
that led us to find, without knowing it, the treasures of friendship.

water and the tin

Stale biscuits in a tin,
stuck in my messenger bag
with other poems.

I never eat them, I just
carry them back and forth
from red brick to glistened green.

where the river runs brown and turgid
spreading out to the banks as though
hungry for the stale biscuits

even though I might be needed to go with
breath and thoughts of you
pull me back in the sunset

and the rattle of stale biscuits
in a tin of dubious history
and unsure futures.

Even without Strangers

Do not approach the night like a lover.

The night, like any unknown city, is

capricious to the best and worse

Its politics are full of darkness and swirling

winds as the rain applauds its validity.

Even without strangers the night is

not pretending to be anyone's family..

There is a rough rumble of thunder and the life

of night is split for a moment by lightning

revealing how much you may never see.