by Pam Crane
The Lurcher had run away
Lived with us for a week
Tail tucked in eyes white
Unable to sleep or speak
For sheer fright
An aged Retriever
Came on holiday -
Christine would leave her
When she went to stay
In France, Goa, Japan,
On fashionable flights
To boost her tan
And see the sights
I loved old Amber
Didn’t mind the hair
On the carpet - fed her
Walked her everywhere
Polished her gold coat
Coaxed vital medicine
Down her throat
We couldn’t win
Old Amber’s gone
She who was nearly mine
Left me with one
Beautiful photograph a line
Or two in an old diary
Her Leo birth chart and
The moment she bit me -
Angry - on the hand.
No dog for me
No dawn exercise
Haven’t the energy
Wouldn’t be very wise
But now just a glance
At Poppy, Wallis, Betsan,
And up they dance -
I give what I can
Walking the beach
Poodles, Staffies, Springers
Strain at the lead to reach
My burning fingers
Burdened with love for them
When did it start?
Did Kent or Bethlehem
Break into my heart?
I am a healer’s wife
Touching a Dog’s Life
Forward to Index
SCRATCHINGS FROM THE BEDPOST ...
This arrow is not a tattoo -
It's something that hospitals do
To prevent any harm
To the undamaged arm
And indicate one bone or two.
Now, piercings were never my thing,
A bar or a stud or a ring ...
You can guess how I feel
With a wrist full of steel,
The latest in hospital bling!
When first I was put in a plaster
I hoped my poor arm would heal faster.
But this fibreglass shell
Is hurting like hell,
A challenge I yet have to master!
When told that I had a green thumb
I’d no idea what was to come!
Now the joint is viridian,
My elbow obsidian,
My garden in need of a chum.
I’m practising being left-handed;
Its digits must do as commanded,
Move on from the mouse
To the whole of the house
Or else I’ll be utterly stranded!
I don’t recall saying when stressed,
‘I’d give my right arm for a rest!’
I rarely maintain
there’s no gain without pain;
so, zip it! I’m doing my best.
(broken arm, summer 2014)
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MIRROR, MIRROR …
Mirror, mirror on the wall
This is a disaster!
Look at me. I'm getting old
Dicky knee in plaster,
Belly-button going south,
Down on chin and down in mouth.
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Once I was a beauty.
Suddenly I feel the cold,
Dances are a duty.
Tired of tramping up the town;
Longing for my dressing-gown.
Mirror, mirrror on the wall
Borrowed time is flying;
Robbing me of memory,
All my friends are dying.
I forgot one funeral;
Names will not remain at all!
Mirror, mirror on the wall
All my bones are crumbling.
Every nerve is going mad
And I've started mumbling.
Lightning flashes in my eyes
Itchy back and jelly thighs.
Mirror, mirror on the wall
Make me stand up straighter!
I am in no rush at all
To meet with my Creator!
I'm fighting back against decline
I'm backing up my life on-line.
Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Don't you go near Facebook!
Here I choose a digital
Lavender and lace look.
Here, I'm who I want to be
In quasi-immortality.
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YOUTH
TAO
One wild horse,
One tame.
One with plaited hair,
One with free mane.
Born of the one Sire,
Foaled of the one Dam,
She is the wild one,
The tame I am.
One dark horse,
One pale,
One trim in ribbon,
One with flying tail.
Caught of the same rope,
Locked in the one stall,
Her ear flattens -
Mine pricks to the Call.
One high horse,
One low,
One for gentle duty,
One for rodeo.
Fired with the same Blood,
Breathing the one Breath,
Twinned in the old shafts,
Love against Death.
One dark curve,
One bright,
One with a dark eye,
One with white.
Poles of the One Love,
Halves of the One Whole.
Locked in a single Light,
Our double Soul.
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BEYOND THE PLOUGHLAND
A cat - asleep? Or dead? - in a bank of grass.
And a bicycle. Dead?
To me who think I live these things are dead.
I pass them,
The huge present; the infinitesimal past.
What do they do there?
Beyond the ploughland lies the blue light.
I will dig coins for myself as I cross the earth.
As my clothes fall off me and die like leaves in autumn
And new grass grows out of the approaching land to clothe me.
Sometimes I am naked.
And I can only watch where the blue horizon hangs
And wait for the wind to finish mating me,
Then bend with my nickel spoon again to turn the earth.
For glimpses of what? Hope?
Splinters of somebody’s past, my future?
The years turn in their sleep and mutter their dreams
Out of the sleeping corn,
And another gold grain sticks in my hand.
The wind sings
You are alone and I run around you
Playing at journeys while you stand and think
And stoop, and yawn, and think, and frown in the furrows.
You never look up at me when you rise;
Your eyes light through me as if - am I there,
dancing before you toward the horizon? -
Where the blue light drips.
The sun curries favour with the wind
And I work alone
Planting love, pricking myself,
And my blood drops somebody’s impulse into the soil.
One day
I shall be riding the dark back of the sea
At the edge of the end of it all -
The inachievable future the great present.
And the blue light will smoke over these lifting waves
To take me into its dream with All the forgotten
Whose thoughts lie unburied, on the ploughland
Where the wind stands
Wondering
Why we left them there
>
Forward to Index
RED FEATHERS
When you last let in the morning frost
To scatter crumbs upon your window-sill,
Shook the bread-board clear over the garden
And watched the wild wings beating down for breakfast,
did you think then? - birds have died for you
So you can have red feathers on your hat.
A cock bled all his gallantry for you -
His love flown to your head.
Put out more bread.
Forward to Index
REFUGEE
Today I knitted myself a hat
In red and green, for the holly season -
And pulled it on, and dreaming sat
In the firelight - when for God’s own reason
A shiver of ice along the bone,
The shock of snow below the skin,
Confused my soul with a soul alone
In her fear. The air, and her shawl, were thin;
She strove barefoot on the mountain
With child and cart and dying man.
No songs, no feasts, no star, no inn
As winter comes to Kurdestan.
Forward to Index
WHICH WAY, AND FOR HOW LONG?
Weird life.
All that time, that rolls
Before and around me like an irregular sea.
A pulse of the world s breath beats like a hill;
Miles of time
To move in the mind of the tortoise,
Spacious years
For living and dying
The day-dance of may-flies over the water.
I have borrowed the slow heart-beat
That shortens the day
And swallowed time in a step too vast
To heed the scurry of rabbit-paths in the thickets.
I have ticked an hour into more aeons of time
Than can be counted or conceived by men
Stripped of empathy and
Armed with stones.
The ant burns away a long life,
And the tree, In the onward rush of seasons.
Trees grow no taller than I;
They watch my life as I would watch an ant.
My day is a second in time
Their day is eternity
To a may-fly.
So what of my strange metabolism
Flung between the particle and the cosmos?
To what end my journeys, lonely as love,
To the last forts of reason?
Which way,
Through lands of a million clocks that tell no more
Than a dandelion puffed away in the wind?
Forward to Index
IN LOVE
A SINGLE ROSE
One rose
harbours a world
shelters a heart
touches a light
Wholly
Strange
One hand
cupping a dream
warming a life
frames love
With utmost
Delicacy
One glance
nearly a word
slowly a touch
dissolve time
In falling
petals
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FITTING - 1
This music is the colour of your eyes
I look out upon the world from under
Your soft lashes
In deep wonder
And slowly smile your smile
Without surprise
Forward to Index
FITTING - 2
Let
the space between
your
lips
and your
Lovely nose
Equal
this
fractional
Light-year
between
My chin
and
Dear delight in
kissing
Your nose
having
my chin
very
Gently
eaten
Forward to Index
IN LOVE
When you are come,
My heart flies out like a green
Bird to meet you.
By night she wanders in rooms
Where you might be.
By day she sits in my head;
In the mere
Stir of her feathers
She hears you coming,
In a leaf-fall,
In a green murmur blowing
Over the fields…
Only my ears dreaming
Of when you were last here.
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JOY-BRINGER
God walks in your eyes, across your smile,
Leaves his footprint in your waiting palm,
Perfects dominion of your gentleness
And reaches out along the loving arm.
You, my redeemer, grace the holiest aisle.
You enclose me with simplicity,
Kindle rose fire as you undress
My soul, naked as pain, maker of me.
We shall in silver time move sound together;
Aeons locked in rosary and white heather.
Forward to Index
MISSION
In still wonder
I am in slow burn
I’ll get there one day
Tired light
Is all left behind
I and you are
Naked
In the dark
Together
We are
Starkly brilliant
Growing
Among stars
Forward to Index
NIGHT MUSIC
In that turbulent peace I laid
My lips in your hair.
No sound nor move you made.
I left them there.
So we remained.
And so your hand I kept,
All that had pained
Me, gone. I held you close. You slept.
If, in that rose-encircled sleep
You know me there,
It is because I weep
Into your hair;
Because this night
Of candled mist has given
More sad delight
Than I can bear so far from heaven.
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WHEN MY EYES CLOSE…
When my eyes close, I am your face.
I am in every place
In which you move.
I feel the bone adjust, and the soul stir,
The entire shape alter.
And this is love.
I am empty of me by day till your return,
I suffer the ice-burn
Of open time
And of a loosed life flowing away
With no tourniquet
But a crude rhyme.
When your forested hand should dam my brain,
Never to cry again,
Were you to love
Me as I want you, some way to reconcile
God with the animal -
That were enough.
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PARTURITION
She has the child now,
Suckling blindly at her love,
Calf-quenching himself
With now a look of limpid acknowledgement;
His fist full of the only gold she has to give
Twisted in sunlit hair.
- Oh, love is a terrible sad thing, Sam.
Oh Sam, love, they hoist you out, and she has you.
With much anguish but more ceremony they cut you free
Than he is ripped from her heart, her life, her chi,
Piecemeal, so even the soul bleeds,
Sam.
She wonders if this after-blood will ever dry,
This other milk, common to star and stone,
Ever ebb from the image of his thirst.
Even lost in the
light-sound-cave
Where she diminished amid echoes
There was no refuge, Sam, for very long;
Even where she went down, kindling, and became sizeless
To help unlock your prison.
He the shadow moves ever amid the gulf of sound,
Ghost of a shade
Slipping between the pulses of her forgiveness
Without touching,
Yet unable to lodge guilt safe
Behind any sonorous membrane of her light.
Oh, Sam, he thinks it a hell-sun,
the glory wherein no shred of man nor woman may hide!
And they abort him from her;
She cannot fight so many grappling hands.
Only lie and howl in her silent places
Like a bewildered beast, and lick each torn part
Of her ravaged immortality.
You, whole, lie and perhaps listen
Out of your own haven;
You are the child she thinks may understand
In manhood and learn to forgive the man
Who ravished so her soul -
Love can be such a terrible harsh pain,
Sam.
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I SING OF YOU
O love, oh dear love, alone in the gaslight,
Lonely and longing I sing of you softly;
Smiling a little I sing of your beauty.
Sad white flower,
weary of infancy,
Curled in shadow away from the sun,
In the moon's hour
You will open unto me,
Sweetly so touching, oh sweetly done.
O love, oh dear love, alone in the gaslight,
Lonely and longing I sing of you softly;
Looking on dreams I sing of your eyes.
Shy-coming light,
Wells of dark in the fells at sunrise
Fringed with light,
Blue-misted morning.
But how they unveil to the welcome night
With dew in the dusk
Thither me beckoning!
O love, oh dear love, alone in the gaslight,
Lonely and longing I sing of you softly;
With love in my fingers I sing of your hair.
Soft as a sparrow and wavy as wind
On the bird-brown moorland,
Wild in the air,
