Wild
the shock of you
bright yellow-collared snake of you
slipping into my view
green of grass and shake
of writhing coils of you
a quick meandering you take

to somewhere blue and new
past the greening make of you
you take the moly river view
where water voles slake
their thirst from river’s dew and you
you skip and slide in fake
dance of fright that drew
flight with quickened loops of you
for a grassy camouflage of hue
for you are wild
it is the pace of your slithering
the race that caught my sight of wild
bright-eyed I thought you were
in glaring yellow eye dissembling
but later learned t’was collar born of wild
to scare the shadow looming there
that frighted and set you undulating
on a track for swift escape to the wild
in panic mode of biding where
the disguise of grass enfolding
shields you and leaves you in the wild
to shiver in your scaly coil there
not knowing that honoured and admiring
I was pleased our paths had crossed in the wild
if only for a moment’s flash there
because you are wild
Mra’ja the history teacher had spent the night lying awake, worrying. At the first show of light, he was loathe to start the day. He let the seconds slip by while restless time passed on, like sand through a bottomless hourglass. He felt himself suspended in the emptied globe. He let the day begin without him.
Gradually, the spirit moved him to rise and open a window. Peering out, he found the sky was steely grey. A voluminous, grey cloud was becalmed in the absence of a wind. It hung like a submarine above the white buildings of Derna. The air was cool on his warm skin. He shivered. Dogs barked in the hills – exclamation marks that punctured his thoughts. Cockerels crowed as they had all night in random fashion, a chaotic rendering of useless assertiveness, now in the East, then over there in the West, next in nearby streets in the suburbs south. A ship in the harbour blasted its horn, a rude interruption. The song thrush, a recent arrival in the orchard, was silent, or else flown. Some things were as before. But the arrival and possible departure of the thrush spoke of seasons changing. In his imagination, he willed the song into being, not blended like the blackbird’s, but intermittent with pauses and repeats.
Then panic fell upon him.

Excerpt from novel Transformed: The Escaped Graphic Child.
There she was at the centre of everything. The centre of everything was a risky place to be for a newcomer. She was teetering on a pivot, like an unpracticed acrobat on a moving trapeze. The world was a great dirndl skirt cavorting In the up-draught of the wind, blowing her this way and that. It rolled away and rolled back, setting her swinging with each return, to be dazzled by a ball of fire.

the hush between pauses
falls away into a mist
of things unsaid
it is an opaqueness
a barrier between the thought
and the word we did not dare to hear
a snowfall of whispers drops into absence
and disperses its blank muteness
in melting sheets of confetti
the unsaid rides like a phantom
bleached under the cold sun
a loosened avalanche of nothing said
with the vanishing wind it is gone
a dream is closed over by heavy lids
an image is consigned to the bin
did we say nothing?
did we never know?
were we so very mute?
.
.
thoughts from the ceramics workshop
the first day of spring eludes us
while drab November malingers
at the workshop window
someone is back from the ski slopes
someone else is off to Berlin and her blog
another is missing from his station
with pewter splashes like a garland
her alabaster head is festooned
and waltzed aloft to the kiln shelf
the smell of wood friction
and meths with shellac mingle
carborundum grinds
the grecian urn deep veined
with fern relief is glazed with wood ash
on chartreuse underglaze
a porcelain seed, Fabergé egg
with seams standing proud
dries in the warming cupboard
your back arched in focussed labour
palm buttressing the clay on the wheel
slurry garnered and returned to reclaim
rose-stuccoed jug of crank slowly drying
coiled vessel with inside opened out
egg-shell blue-rimmed flutedmugs
transparent matt is stirred
a beech leaf is incised in wax
with fine scraffito tool on bisque
a blue-green bust emerges from its cast
the plaster crack ridged across her face
will wear to file pad and wet and dry
shellac filigree for foliage dries on the bat
resist against a water weathering
bathed to translucent thin
paper porcelain petals wait for glass fusion
poppies nod in memory of absent George
Gujarati heads turn in rainbow saris
a lost citadel grows in my head the while
vectors of bird flight cross the boundaries
freeing memories once trapped in walls
it’s snowing somewhere in the north
.
.
Part One: Drought
Cyrene’s slopes are draped
with marble pillars
fallen columns cross the paths
and grass grows free of traffic
a tiled bath drained of water
flashes blue with lapis lazuli
before the ruined base
of the temple to Artemis
fleecy seed heads float
among the long shadows
of Corinthian pillars
white and ghost-like
the cadence of a horn
sounds the evening fall
its trembling prayer
washing down the valley
sighing in the wind
to halt the suffocation
its ululating tongue sings
for the fissured land
Beyond the amphitheatre
a camel lies in coma
poisoned by a silver leaf whose
yellow flower withered after spring
the old lore of sacrifice
washes through her dream;
red and brutal sacrificial blood
floods and rages there
she must sleep on
to death’s last ambush,
dreaming of the coming winter
and winter’s rain
Part Two: Nightmare
Her shortening breath flounders
lodged in inflamed lungs
and the shepherd’s horn is still
At nightfall, the camel draws
away from the struggle
straining to the tread of
a gazelle halting at the glade’s edge
turning to the sea
with the desert at its hind quarters
It scents the brine and bridles
pulled by the tug of thirst
and bleats:
I have come from where nothing grows
along the tracks of dry stream beds
that wave their ribbons of lost hope
fleeing to a salty sea
On cracked earth forking this way and that
a crazed path takes me to a hillside
where a man is bound to a petrified tree
naked on a hillside.
Dogs growl and snarl around him
snatching at his kneecaps.
Through the night he groans
fading into dawn’s mist.
His pitted flesh leans there
into sand-gritted wind.
He seeks my touch
but I must run.
Leaping on
drawing breath
from the blue edge
of a crescent headland
the gazelle quenches its thirst
in a salt swell
with throat salt-encrusted
blood dried and curdled
The camel has a vision
and shudders in her shelter
under the canopy
of green oleander
a fennec fox glides
over the stone wall
and scents the body
lying in the dust
Sifting through the dust
it finds the camel’s eye
staring under drowsing lashes.
The camel stirs and
thinks the pointed face
is the maddened prisoner
his face scored with tears
that drip a soundless protest:
I answer ’no’
for that is all I have
that is still mine.
I spoke of love
and hate received
from men who feared Reason
No is what I am
No is the action I carry
No is the people you would have me name
No is the plot you say was mine
No is the death you have prepared for me
No is the succumbing to that end.
Part Three: Rain at last
Large drops pressed the dust
plunged the riven cracks
and bounced on iron furrows.
Rain pummelled the earth
into putty softness
carving a corkscrew channel
in a drowning hill.
Red water turned and turned
its watery blades pounding
off-loading loam into the bay.
On the rushing hillside
lay the camel waking;
the flood dividing at her shelter
she heard its roar.
In the orchard of pomegranate
in a rain vast valley
the almond tree cracked.
Rain chiseled a path
with measured pouring
along split boughs
and peeling bark
into red mud earth.
Torrents rumbled the fall
of a sliding surface
that moved into the sea.
Unhinged in bleached memory
the camel waded
through white spaces
of whitening fear.
Witness, camel, how painful
the dying of the prisoner now
in the tumultuous cries
of day’s arrival
how painful the passing away
in the sensational morning
that follows night.
Part Four: Aftermath
A father kneels in new grass
on flowers petal-crushed
and whispers his despair
in supplication over each shoulder.
A mother turns to the tall cypress
in her grief-frozen distance
she reaches for the sky
and birds in flight
A wife gathers her children
consoling and holding them
and their shock stands still
at the centre of embrace.
.
.
something in the mind tells me I am overheating
singed neurons frazzle in the brain’s map
the pillow is a lump of rock
the mattress a tarmac road
my blanket is a collage of the cast skins of cicadas
my limbs reach out for air
my lungs expand for want of oxygen
my eyes bulge under prickling lashes and
I press down into the sackcloth vacuum of evasive sleep
the soaring fahrenheit of day barely tumbles in the night
heat accumulates overcasting my breath like clouds of fog
suffocating my thoughts of dreaming light
with would-be somersaults of washed-out energy
nouns are conjugated and verbs disagree with their subjects
facts are slashed across with half-forgotten memories of what was known
somewhere along the way
what was once so sure melts like skewered marshmallow in a flame
the race of time slows and sinks into the raucous din
of insect abdomens vibrating in an insect rally for a mate
the cicadas sing all day and night
competing with some imagined monster rival
the motors of air conditioning buried deep in concrete fabric –
drown conversation with their orchestral performance
the insect horde tunes its forte to crescendo pitch
in overlapping waves of night thermals
from their lofty perches they drill with incessant strokes into the tremors of night heat
while a lone cricket bells its piercing strumming to the heat haze
stoking up its symphony to mercury peaking in a glass
stranded in the still air it strikes a strident note
a monotone of something trapped
like the moth struggling in the heating duct its wings bruised in its panic
the panic in me
as the train’s siren wails its hooting warning across the prairie reminiscent of Western movies and
as the gargantuan refuse truck booms its heavy sweep of melting tar its tyres squealing in the traction
the pillow softens
the mattress relents and
the horizontal receives me
my limbs are abandoned stranded apart north west east and south
my brain is carded into felt
Then in a sudden the moth breaks free from its furnaced holding and
fills the night air with its dark fluttering
Before the day swells up like dough sweating in an oven
the piano tinkles its amazing grace with lilting cadence right to the final coda
then as morning proves itself again
its strains challenge the cicada to a contest
belting out its hymnal to the chorus of morning has broken
the cicadas strum louder still so that
the beat of their tumultuous concert
is like the rhythmic throb of the first awakening
when primal earth first poured forth its molten mass
.