A sudden start
as the passing wind
of preceding cars
eddies squirrel shimmies
from an unseen discard,
and the label, darker
than a clear bottle,
squirms a small
mammal’s jig.
Fists clench wheel,
I’m ready to pedal hard,
hazard up-thumb mercy,
break and clutch and pray
for life. But, no.
Time split squints
and it’s empty dead,
just more trash,
more unkillable
plastic.
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.
Very pleased to have ‘Struck’ published at the Poetry Shed.
This one was inspired by an object shown to me many years ago by the very knowledgable Sandy Edwards, who was curator of the Bell Pettigrew Natural History Museum at the time. Since then I have (amongst other things!) spent many years being fortunate enough to do ‘media odd jobs’ for researchers involved in studying the scope and meaning of sounds made by marine mammals. My knowledge of what they do is slight, but I continue to find what they discover remarkable and inspiring.
Something a little different – a gallery with an assortment of some of the images and montages that I’ve made to illustrate this blog over the past wee whiley …
A poppy pin.
Fallen, rainwashed,
Rusted, gathered,
Repinned, raindropped.
A tiny lamp relit.
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.
.
.
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Somewhere in the back of my mind, were the wonders of the ‘perfume maker’s organ’ – like this magnificent and rare specimen at the Palazzo Mocenigo Museum in Venice.
Something a little different – a series of seven ‘photo-label-poems’.
These are a light hearted response to an invitation from my brother-in-law to take part in a seven day ‘nature image’ photography challenge.
I decided to combine my response with a small collection of old laboratory bottles loaned from a colleague at work, and with some [very] short poems responding to each image, in the form of a label…
