Chêne de la Pleyde

Final day of Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic prompt. Here’s a final contribution (unless there’s one tomorrow). You can see the images here, and read the poems.

Chêne de la Pleyde

They ask you what you see in the lone tree,
witch, Gorgon, Ent perhaps?
And in the clouds (usually dragons),
in bird formations. You count the magpies
and how many petals are left on the daisy.

There’s an old oak here, has a name,
and it grows in a meadow where horses graze and run.
It grows and spreads and hugs its history
into rings inside its chest.

It looks like the past, present and future,
the horse-tree, holding this hillside together
beneath a chaotic sky, showered
with black darts of birds and the red orb,
descending, taking us with it, it says.

Not Apokalypsis and more Ragnarök than Götterdämmerung

Inspired by the images from Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge.

Not Apokalypsis and more Ragnarök than Götterdämmerung

When the birds are all netted up,
like stars, a forgotten constellation,
trees branched in dead twigs,
ready to combust in air incandescent,
all our seas incarnadine,
no clear water between,
the last flicker will be bright
as damselflies, dancing
on the stream, once.

Afterwards

To continue is apocalyptic vein, this is my response to today’s ekphrastic challenge from Paul Brookes. You can see the images and read the responses here.

Afterwards

when the trees creep away from the rain
that burns and scorches,
when we cannot see the edge of the cliff,
waves mounting,
and the ocean writhes with mutated life,
garish as electric cables, penicillin-livid,
when our Petri dish overflows
with the sewage of the squeezed out bowels
of seven billion bodies,
will we use all those proud flags
to make winding sheets
for the dead on all those little hills?

The shame of it all

As expected, the Oracle’s message was not a happy one. It seems to me that it fits the images of Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge though. Another unintentional sonnet.

The shame of it all

The world was a wild garden once,
its music strummed by the wind,
sung by the birds,
a garden where women walked without fear,
until someone put his finger to his lips
and laid in wait and shame,
put his strength to destruction,
engendered the sorrow and the pity.
Where wild roses rambled, and the green forest
kept watch, he set an ocean of plastic.
We wander in the desert now,
no flag to unite us, and fear dogs our steps,
that lead only to the murmuring ocean,
cradling the corpses of penguin chicks.

No splendour

A sort of sonnet response to Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic prompt for today. You can see the images that inspired it and read the other responses here.

No splendour

They build high into the dark of neon
and pigeon-misery, their crooned sorrows,
where there is no today, no past,
only tomorrows, layer on layer.

Dull dark heaves in the ill-defined sky,
of anchored cruise ships, where boxes sit,
in their perfect fit, that fills a need
for the great community of solitude.

Rodents climb the mesh of graphics
in search of basics, the crumbs fallen
from the table of heaven’s high,
looking for their roots among the debris at Babel’s foot,

where no roses scramble up sunny walls,
no one picks true fruit from a garden tree.

Dark days

This was inspired by the artwork for Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge.

Dark days

These days
almost everything
has a look of raw meat
open wounds
of broken things
the stains left
when matter has been hosed away.

Cleansing

Written in response to the images from yesterday’s ekphrastic challenge.

Cleansing

A handful of straw
to clean out an urban failure
time runs faster now than in Augeas’ day
flimsy and cheap the walls
winds blow fiercer
and we watch the bitters waters rise
with trepidation.

In a soulless room

Inspired by the images for day 16 of Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge.

In a soulless room

a plastic-potted plant spots the window
with exotic flowers, an ineffectual screen;
misery howls in the street.

Trampled paper decorations,
streamers strewn, torn and sticky,
remain, memorials of the squalid party,

and in the howling misery by the kerb,
green leaves pattern puddles,
never outshining the petrol spill rainbows.

Haibun for the path taken

For yesterday’s ekphrastic prompt, inspired by Robert Frede Kenter’s photograph.

I often looked at the immeubles at Montreuil, red and yellow brick, grimy from the traffic, arranged around a central courtyard, empty and unlovely. I’d pick a window, an apartment and wondered what it must be like to live there. We had to move, find somewhere quickly, and I envied the families who lived in those blocks, even though they were grim, because they had homes. They could stay in Paris. We left, tossed far beyond the Forêt de Retz, beyond the grey stones of Soissons, landing like an unexploded obus in the still green and wooded calm of a land of war cemeteries. And we thrived.

in the green quiet
for no apparent reason
a woodpecker shrieks

Figments

Joining in Paul Brookes’ ekphrastic challenge today. You can see the three images that inspired this poem here.

Figments

And did those feet,
the Ancient of Days,
ever tread,
that winged ghost-hover brood
upon dark waters,
strewn with the refuse of ages,
gushing with all the perfumes
of Arabia and Unilever
(perhaps the latter requires a badge ®
though the Ancient of Days does not)?

I could pick flowers in a meadow
or leave them to set seed,
not tread, hover or sanctify,

and the dove, that chooses to roost
in the central cog of the wheel,
has no need of beauty or cycles of life;

its small brain is content
with the matrix of its constructor.