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You stayed to tell me a story
fearless or foolish, braveheart or banale
you knelt at the sacrificial altar
a big mistake.
So the needy stay forgotten
the desperate still forlorn
and limb-strewn rubble commonplace
to the eyes of the world
now distracted
to follow the story of you.

Grisaille

Wednesday yawns, and the call to sleep,
to rinse the once fast colours of my memories
that history feints to vague affairs.
Who was that beauteous girl
who ran like the fawn, quink on her fingers,
who smelled of cold toast?
Alas gone, forever
dancing through the flimsy leaves
in a Morphean maze of tangled veils,
no footprints left
my brief ecstacy turned to loss,
no evidence caught as lambs wool on a briar,
tumultuous pleasure at such costly price.
I wake, full knowing of the robbery
but cannot list my loss.

Chaff

I shredded another box of your stuff today,
just papers, business, statements and the like,
nothing personal.
Your affairs, amongst an angry whirring drone
fell like snowflakes into a bucket,
cross-cut life.
Its going in a trench, beneath manure
and this season’s runner beans,
chaff and horseshit turned into veg.
But saved from this cutting fate,
A neatly-folded fire insurance
certificate from the Pru,
dated 1949, priced 4s 6d.
It wouldn’t buy a box of matches now.

© Graham Sherwood 4/2012

Apostles

We laugh and tell them we’re Pago-Buddhists,
devotees, a membership of two
celebrating the change in season,
content not having that which others seem
to take for granted.
Coal jackdaws dance along your arm
as we meet to face the teachers from our past,
my spilth of words decanting silently
from a pocket hole,
will leave a cryptic trail
for those that surely follow on.
So let’s measure each other’s faith with jokes,
rub soap beneath our fingernails
and choose bright robes to don.

© Graham Sherwood 3/2012

Grasmere

Of course the hill does not move,
although the waking eye is fooled
to think so.
The pale slate backdrop slides by
from right to left,
a trompe d’oeil
that sends me back to bed confused.
Later three sooty trees silhouette
their veined fingers
as the picture turns to breakfast blue.
Distracted from a crossword and eggs Benedict,
I take another surreptitious glance.
Now, this pretty girl who doesn’t disappoint
is dressed in green velvet frocks,
she tantalizes me throughout the day,
resolute, not to move an inch
or look my way,
as each act of the day’s pantomime scenery
is wheeled past my eyes,
a vulgar cereal packet colour box.
Crushed, I later dress for dinner
and almost miss the teasing ripple
of her cowgirl rump
as she waltzes to the wings.
Exit stage right.

© Graham Sherwood 3/2012

Dark Room

We are not multi-cultural
neither you nor I,
merely atheist and zealot shackled,
singularly suspicious, doubly wary,
you of my painted skin
me, your voluminous robes.
I hear the barbed vowels that
you cast to the quickening wind,
which cuts to ribbons
my shell-shocked hospitality.
Quietly I show my bravery
by plotting your final days
behind thick oak doors, camouflaged
in sugary platitudes.
Remember what the common cold
did to the Martians, a generation ago.
Empires fall,
and our futile resistance
will then reveal your olive shadows
as nothing,
but paper shapes of last night’s
nightmare.

© Graham Sherwood 3/2012

Essencia

Whenever birds fall silent in a troubled twilight
or that fleeting moment before the millisecond of a sneeze,
in the waking blink before we lose a dream
and the confusion as we cry whilst smiling,
then the thought of food be food enough for thought
our deafening lives are numbed by newly fallen snow
it is special.

© Graham Sherwood 2/2012