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Vauxhall Sand Martins
From Slough Sewage Works
to a football field in Uxbridge;
Can you spot the Ring-billed Gull
among the others? Portland Bill,
in raptures: first a Desert Wheatear,
then a Ring Ouzel. And where
was the heath, that hot March
with the Crossbills? Whatever
is on the line, we follow the majesty
to places thought unvisitable.
Something’s blown in on tumbledown winds
so pack the flapjacks
and start the Passat. We’re off
to Vauxhall Sand Martins,
gravel pits and estuary flats,
seabirds slotted between tower blocks –
cormorants off the Isle of Dogs.
Can you sense the sea by St Edmund’s,
Millwall, reflected back
in shallows of the outer dock?
We’ll mark the species off,
more than a hundred in twelve hours,
from Slough Sewage Works
to a football field in Uxbridge,
from the post-dawn grey of Portland Bill
to an equivalent dusk on Bugsby’s marshes.
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Keates Lane
Something about consciousness returning to God
in the mysteries of the elements of the earth
we sink or scatter into. How can this be true?
One shard of the ultimate is born and retires
on an eternal pension to mists of perception
while the living cling to your form as material.
Escape karma and further incarnation
when you no longer bind to anything.So how could past molecules be forced,
and by whom, into non-elective lifetimes?
Again the thought comes by Wren’s hotel
and the river bridge, but I lose language
to work out what it is beyond phantom pain
or ‘ride no faster than your angel can follow’
on the back of a motorbike leaving Keates Lane.
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In-between Time
Who’s that on CCTV
wandering up through corridors of uncertainty
for just those few minutes of peace?
The day has a muted pallor, light clouds –
you can feel it in the carpet.
It’s an in-between time
for using the facilities, leafing through
magazines and memories,
finding the secluded sea-lounge,
maybe: wondering where your family is.
You don’t mind if the insulating grey lifts,
stays or just gets that bit lighter
and you won’t say it’s a wasted day
when the sun carries its own pressure.N.b. This is a poem from Tired Resort, a sequence set at the coast towards the end of summer. The other poem on these pages from that sequence is Too Active.
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Pontardulais
You used to celebrate voices on the wind,
but now yours is the one drifting through daydreams
diffuse as the notes in a thousand earphones.
Your face is in a cubist montage,
now in craft brew buildings, the depths of sleep
or a garden centre in Pontardulais.
Surveying snow against black beyond midnight
the earth contains in its six foot depths,
ashes are scattered among the Tuileries, out at sea
or in odd garden patches, air and rime.
So there are merits of the fixed and dispersed in time:
headstone and empty urn on the landing alike.
But nothing resolves so when you say we ‘live on’
I can only assume you mean that we die.
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Too Active
n.b. This is part of a sequence called Tired Resort set at the coast towards the end of summer
Too Active
With everything strapped to your car:
boats and bikes, a tired passenger,
I wondered…with these holiday triathlons
to every snatched restorative drink –
are you not that bit too active?You’ve got a dog to slow you down and radiate peace
but it sped you up a cliff on a short leash.
You could never be stationary, ever
fully here, and a coffee is for future plans
getting smaller by the year.
Photo by Harrison Haines via Pexels https://www.pexels.com/@harrisonhaines/
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Held Ground
On inundated soil, the ground held its green
in the lakes and depressions.
A stroll from the manager – solitary barman
in the tap rooms of melancholy,
wondering who on a surface of imperfections
was cutting ribbons, opening bluebell buildings
in remote pockets of woodland,
hoping and regretting wayside desolation
lined the verges of memory
(though the ground held for all its shifting) –
ended in an ancient stone bench
in the ruins of an abandoned castle
with a view over the valley to the sea
with peace only found in layers of time
rather than hopes of future prospects:
the only prospect is in the trees.
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White Waltham
Through an avenue, a thin-branched canopy
in mid-March sun, I sense a tear
at a momentary view through the branches
of sudden light on a brown red kite
and a turning twin-prop glinting white.
The canopy ahead, branches entwined,
seems a welcome through the countryside
around horses, bikes and fresh-seeded fields
to distances of mid-green and lime.
Almost wanting to suspend this moment,
we know mourning begins to riddle
threads of life which thrive in their prime.
Better to be here in arboreal winter
than sense an end of summer not yet arrived.
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Opting Out
Opting Out
There’s a different kind of freedom
when you opt out in faded Berghaus,
not carrying much over the bridge
as a train rattles over the viaduct
between stubble fields, lighting its way
like the end of your roll up.
You descend into a quiet neighbourhood,
perhaps heading to the allotments
with a radio tuned to football results
that are just a stream of numbers
providing vague reassurance of life
existing under storm clouds unleashing
outcomes of low pressure weather systems
from grey ghost husks over Forfar and Kinlochleven.
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Pan Haiku Review issue 3
I am grateful that ‘The News from Schiphol Airport’ has been published in Alan Summers’ Pan Haiku Review, Issue 3 (p59). This is an open season issue, open to poems of up to ten lines in any form. However, none of the following words could be included: silence, silent, silently, still, stillness, reflection, reflected, old, young, alone, lonely, lone or any variations of those words. You can find out more about Alan Summers in this mini documentary which was featured on PHK (National Japanese Televison). This edition of the Pan Haiku Review includes submission guidelines for Babylon Sidedoor, the Autumn edition, as well as the review section Blōō Outpost, a wide range of poems of up to ten lines and editorial insights throughout on the nature of poetry & prose writing.
The News from Schiphol Airport
Now derisory
is the dividend from labour
as I see the red brick,
read the news from Schiphol Airport,
notice the leaves drift by the river
and mud trodden in the tension of the week,
the sky and stone wall,
the dog in the waterAlex Saynor
Wilderspool Causeway 