Cool dude
He smiles at them
above a check summer
shirt, the type of sack
women find disarming
the colours of his check
say what the heck!
Unshaved he feels
he has his freedom
paved, he is summer’s
Cool dude, never rude
his manner is bordering on
“Do you come here often?”
Only it’s the reassurance
of his eyes which safely
disposes of his bag
of lies, all sewn into
his same summer
shirt – when the sun
shines out loud, it is a trifle
faded like those jaded, misty
affairs of last summer’s love.
Little Paradise
In the distance
the snow caps
sparkle like white
Diamonds-
The peaks of –
the Sierra Nevada
“The best view in Europe.”
Lorca had once said
and below the…
‘Huerta de los Mudos.’
In English its
‘The orchard of the Dumb’
garden of the red poet
where poems and plays were
furrowed in his “Little paradise.”
Before the rush
of gypsy ballads.
Before fascism
rose and won.
A Scholar
To Gerard Manley Hopkins
At the duskiest of hours
I see letters in a shyer
tinge of gold, secret notes
above the orange flicker of fire.
In Dublin town they say he
lectured Greek and Latin
a scholar to you and me
he wore a shirt, black of satin.
Conversed with the classics alone
spied poverty in alleyway and street
wrote music as he walked, each tone
higher than the cobbles below his feet.
Ignited by the goodness of each day
but how he missed the green lawn
blessed by powers above, he would say
of his birth, by woody lanes sewn
into memory, each leaf of red
or brown, or shades unknown-
it is there prayers and poetry he read
beside a river’s breeze always alone.
Within his diary’s cover, the soft
of leather issued from a skin
most delicate, a parting gift
from a sister porcelain and thin
‘Know thyself ‘ as the Greeks would say
he bid each student on their way.
Everything
The barrow man came with a jingle of sounds,
new life he offered from his cart of everything
from fresh souls baked at the itch of dawn to
melancholy for winter nights, or the purest textures
like a cardigan you’d adore. Anything, everything
he sells from brambles to bottles of fear, the whiff
of tomorrow or a taste of what it was to be in an orbit
with secrets closeted within a perfect panacea.
Here’s a lotion for curing a window of the head
or a pipe Sir, lady or Madam to smoke with the promises
of your tallest tomorrows, inhale what could be achieved
instead of the boredom of jam days, butter and bread.
With that, the departure of the barrow man roared like
a bell without a tongue and out of this imaginary
town to a destination with everything clear like a time
patch worked, scattered and bare.
