Bob Rogers
Falmouth, Cornwall
On hearing Sibelius is not popular in Italy
Earth, turned in a timescale not our
own,
shifts on her axis.
The winedark seas
congeal.
Implacable white armies, more ruinous
than Hun or Hannibal, advance across the Alps.
Snow swirls around deserted squares
where fountains crack like glass,
and marble nymphs are gripped,
groped, choked and split apart
by water in its other, ugly, mood.
Olive trees, wisteria,
warm lizard-haunted rocks,
The endless meals among the trellised vines;
the Sabine farm and Arethusan spring;
the crucifixes, candles, hidden silent nuns;
and all those sweetly-laughing,
sweetly-chattering Lalages;
and all that art
- all gone.
Seals bask among the
ruined domes.
Wolves howl along the crumbling colonnades.
Angelee
Deodhar
Chandigarh, India
Two Haiku
midnight walk
the dog nudges me down
our moonlit path
so many stars
through the pruned grapevine
the buzz of mosquitoes
Robin
Bell
Perthshire, Scotland
Two
Romances of Chivalry
Counsel for Damsels
in Distress
Beware the galloping
white Knight
Take heed when he advances,
for knights charge helplessly behind
the impulse of their lances.
Counsel for White
Knights
Beware of damsels in
distress.
They thank you very nicely,
but they create a nasty mess
if you should rescue twicely.
Cid
Corman
Kyoto, Japan
Three poems
1.
Nobody has
ever escaped.
Life is foolproof.
2.
In the hills
for a few days
couldn't write
Gone further found
less - maybe
you know the place
3.
To embrace
a tree - how
silly can
one get - yet
To want to
dance with it
the way the
wind's doing.
Robert
Belcher
Sydenham, Kent
Isle of Dogs
Crimson roofs slant into
the dock pool.
Aslant metal walkways and mirrored glass:
Legoland flats, empty restaurants, towers
Rising on all sides too bright to be viewed
Directly, like God. In their catacombs
Shopping malls materialise - the drab
Eastenders, out of place, amazed by
Sliding doors and endless moving stairways.
Trailing back along the quay, we find
A past age - a few terraced streets -
Kids in half-groups not bothered even
To rebel: a broken scrap of social fragments,
Bewildered, vacant as the streets.
A seagull on a streetlight shrieks, shits.
James
Harpur
Cork, Ireland
Brendan the
Navigator
The naked hermit, cliffs
of ice, the cold,
The island of the saints emerging from
Black fog as light, its shore of powdered gold
And apples ripening in
every orchard
The youth who welcomed each of us by name -
These died around the settled fires of Clonfert
But Judas on his rock,
wind-burnt, stripped wise,
Writhing above the slaughter of the sea
Remains pristine inside my deepest darkness
His eyes alert for the
approach of demons -
I see them glowing as when we rowed away
And hear his voice above the raucous
ocean,
'Hell is stasis, keep
heading for the sun
And when you reach the light, sail on, sail on.'