I come from the North, but have lived in Poole for fifteen years with my wife, Julie, and my three children. I am currently working in a chaplaincy project in Poole and have worked as a school chaplain and parish priest. I love art, my log-burner, wide open spaces, good coffee, Wolverhampton Wanderers and the guitar. Poole Poetry Group has been a great place to develop my love of poetry in a hospitable group ready to listen and share ideas.

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Raoul Dufy

La Mer au Havre

 

 

We can get no closer than this: though we long to.

Fresh, blue, vast and deep

We envy the boats their caress with the

Sea and are held at our limit.

We just gaze, revelling in the disturbance

deep within that rolls and flaunts with the wave and tide and cannot be satisfied.

 

For in this view we are reminded that we are bigger than our

lives and smaller

than the echo of blue and green and shimmering space

that whispers to us as warning : don't jump , just look.

 

Wales

 

The towns and villages of Wales disguise something.

Is it a plot, cooked up by the possessive bards

That shows the world the slate-grey, when beyond it is the green?

Is the heart of Wales cold and wet,

As impenetrable as grey slate

And is the green only moss layers

Of forgetting and ignoring, or avoiding?

The words of Welsh twang hard and sharp;

A warning to those who come close;

But they are words that stand before

Their latin-saxon neighbours; words that were before and have no need to refer elsewhere.
These words are at home, original; stones amid the stream of language; language that speaks for itself.

 

The Buzzard

 

A buzzard flies up from the brown valley floor

clearing the scrabble and fluster of the morning wood and the taunts at his high pitched cry from the birds with wider range in song.

 

As he rises he sees further across the hill, down on the wood and the river above the scrappy din of the hedge and fields.

Only then can he release a thin cry of pleasure and , stretching his broad wings, shoulders loose and circling

writes in the sky ; 'this is mine'.

 

 

Morning Cloud

 

The shining face of the small cloud still lit by the dawn, hangs on. The morning sky struggles to arrange itself to the pattern of the sky; the clouds, like children surprised by a teacher entering the room.

But this one cloud I will take with me as, in its defiant stand, it has turned me toward the sun.

 

Sun

 

My world turns again to find the sun in the frozen sky - framed by the tree which has grown two hundred moments for this.

Beyond question, there, complete colour against a thawing green the sun holds the past back for just enough time to ask

'…and today?'