Author Archives: grahamswords1962

Last year’s leaves assume the footsteps of mice,Scuttling across an empty dance hall dance floor.Empty as an out-of-season football ground car park;On a Sunday.Empty as a school playground in summer,The footsteps filling the space childhood voices had vacated.Occupying the still Arctic plains with pinpoint acoustic precision.And yet, it was not cold. Nothing else stirred, notContinue reading “Miro’s Square”

To miss the emotion in intimacyAnd the intimacy of emotion,Simultaneously,Is the curse of a pyric victory. The wraith of love scornedIs a starving hyena,A self-serving carnivore of the soul,Serially committing Seppuku. Here is the cold, wet quayside,Where sailors cast off hope.With one foot aboard and the other on shore,Hankering for neither and both. Chefs thatContinue reading “Black Pearl”

My tired and wracked body rocks, To the sound of patrolling wind beyond glass panes,The wind that sought it out among the fields and lanes, Along the windswept paths and gust-filled plains,Where buffeted birds rose and fell, Like tossed boats on heaving seas, Unequal to the overblown breeze,I feel it taunting me from outside. WeContinue reading “Windchill”

First the search.For the empty space,The safe space, where legs don’t stroke, whereElbows need not beg forgiveness, fromEyes that have tectonic resistance to meeting.The space amongst the pigeon-holed mannequins. Silence is the order of the day,No one bought a ticket to speak. Inside ear bud tuned worlds,Lives unfurl,In silence. Silent, like a jury in waiting,PoxContinue reading “Ping Ping”

Each time it happens, it happens,It happens in the same way. Embroidered filigree dried lace petals of hydrangea, So, soft. Solo fall from me, falling, and as they fall,Fall away in fine weights. Iridescent fish scales float down gently on bat wings, So, silent. And reveal a lesser me, a less me,Lessened to something thatContinue reading “Filigree”

I watched James Bulgin’s “How the Holocaust Began” – it inspired this. Every year, for O’ so many years,The perfectly manicured green fingertips appear. Clawing their way up towards the sun’s rebirth,They mark their unseen place beneath the earth. Signs of Spring, signs of things to come,Signs of things that cannot be undone. Labels, markersContinue reading “Fingertips”

In the summer of our salad days, the gods of music set the score,Life’s autumn would be marked by three times twenty and four. Standing on that doorstep, over our shoulders we glance,At all the times shared clothed in laughter, song and dance. Then, this point seemed so very, very far away,And yet, from here,Continue reading “For Caroline and Dave”

As we headed east, above our heads the sequential lights went out,One, by one, by one, until every one,Was dark. The dawn’s gloom rose, slowly, as our eyes unfurled from their beds,To behold a sight, so rare, so bright,So stark. A perfect screen of iridescence, a diamond-cut blazing foil against which,Two dimensional man-made silhouettes stood,SoContinue reading “Morning lights”

He hears me without listening,Without ears. He sees me without looking,Without eyes. He speaks to me without talking,Without a voice. But I hear him daily, feel his words about me,Not about, but around me. He looks older now, his skin pale and drying,Scrawny arms in silhouette revealing, A frame still statuesque,Even in his winter years.Continue reading “My Old Man”

The thicket is as quiet as the lace on a maid’s apron,Bauble berries drape with the same frosted lace,And from the darkness,A chorister sings. Crystal clear in the dun morning air,Louder than a church bell on Sunday,His bellows bright red and pumping,As to his blood. Soon, the sun will rise and with it,The falsetto trillContinue reading “January song”