so this is where you live

your sitting tenant life

in damp lower ground accommodation

I nearly missed your army fatigue

autumn leaf coloured camouflage

and those headlamp eyes that

see sky and ground simultaneously

in that corner where we keep

the compost near the dead wood

perhaps you are planning

a forage or awaiting

an unsuspecting insect

your turned down mouth

lips tight as a letterbox

nonplussed by my presence

I watch you squat dry and rooted

still as a grave contemplating

the smooth-skinned hop of frogs

and their urgency to be kissed

First Published in The Weekly Avocet #243, August 2017

My poem ‘Still Life Of A Toad’ has been published in The Weekly Avocet #243. I’m very grateful to Charles Portolano, the editor of this online journal of poems about nature, for choosing it for inclusion.

It’s all about perspective. For example,
the imaginery landscape behind
for Leonardo was the perfect contrast
to my reserved posture but, to me,
is theatrical and over-the-top.

He so desperately wanted my portrait
to depict ideal womanhood like
the Virgin Mary yet he painted
a frumpy plain Jane housewife.

Although I’m known as La Gioconda,
meaning jocund, I didn’t see the funny
side of that, nor the sitting for an eternity
on that rickety pozetto armchair.

There is a hint of a smile in the upturned
corners of my mouth and eyes but it’s no
laughing matter to be stared at constantly.
I never wanted to be famous.

You probably think I’m ungrateful and
should be called Moaner. You’d be right,
but I’m laughing on the other side of my
face now. As I said, it’s all about perspective.

I would like to say a big thank you to Lorette C Luzajic, editor of The Ekphrastic Review, for publishing my poem ‘Mona Lisa Musing’ today.

http://www.ekphrastic.net/

the Irish Sea and Mersey meet with iron fists
winter still slices through March days that
make cloaked crows distrust black clouds

that blanket Liverpool towers in ghost-town
mist and haunt high above this grave where
New Brighton’s Eiffel stood, a ballroom

where the Beatles played, now lego-estate-
still-life, stamp-sized gardens in cul-de-sacs
standing atop timber steps down to the prom

past foraging grounds of sandpiper
and redshank, camouflaged by spring tide.
as silver arrows stab through storm clouds

to sharpen the lens on Liverpool’s waterfront
I embark the aged ferry, distant Cheshire hills
outlined above waves that stretch out like space.

First published by  The Open Mouse, July 2017

A Long Walk the Irish Sea and Mersey meet with iron fists winter still slices through March days that make cloaked crows distrust black clouds that blanket Liverpool towers in ghost-town mist and haunt high above this grave where New Brighton’s Eiffel stood, a ballroom where the Beatles played, now lego-estate- still-life, stamp-sized gardens in […]

via Paul Waring — The Open Mouse

Erich Fromm’s ‘Art of Loving’ is the book
I never read in teenage years before
I fell madly in love with just one look
and so often after I’m not quite sure
why I placed trust in lust in the first place –
experiencing shame; and mistaken,
diving head first, landing flat on my face
far away from Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ –
one less travelled; the path I didn’t see;
though pain taught me to be less short-sighted,
self-loathing, desperate, unhappily
driven by lust; my love unrequited –
and here Shakespeare has described my plight well;
heaven’s attraction had kept me in hell.

First published by Poets Online June 2017

My poem ‘Inspired by Sonnet 129’ has been posted in Poets Online’s Sonnets May 2017 (via link below: poem in Archive section under Sonnets)

http://poetsonline.org

She felt the pull of full moons on distant
cliff tops drowned in marbled light

telescopic eyes waiting to know and bore
deeper each time. Her cocked ear heard

magnets align currents like stars beneath
a pained black sea. I think she knew.

In a dream I saw Venus at solstice
nursing spoonfuls of strawberry moon.

I thought it was her. That this time
she had wandered too close. But
in midnight mist I couldn’t be sure.

First published in Eunoia Review, June 2017

She felt the pull of full moons on distant cliff tops drowned in marbled light, telescopic eyes waiting to know and bore deeper each time. Her cocked ear heard magnets align currents like stars beneath a pained black sea. I think she knew. In a dream I saw Venus at solstice nursing spoonfuls of strawberry […]

via the girl who knew the moon — Eunoia Review