Tag: erasure

It’s going on all the time
water everywhere like the poem, a hymn
From shallow overflows insects sip
like cautious antelope, birds nest below deck
something’s living in a toothpaste lid in Cuba
no Perelandra these floating isles

Out comes the plough now
– refining the marshes where gardens struck
one mirador with cursory views of long gone faces
Perhaps it’s true that this side of remembering
we met with cuckoos travelling out of Africa
in a tangle of axons thoughts under
take a memory test – my analyst sees a green light
the right hemisphere, a pictorial phosphorescence
but it was no waking fancy

It is that dry, restless time of year
a strange creation now with the labyrinth gone
crucified to courtyard walls, trees proffer fruit
on sunbaked limbs, a line defines the space
underfoot herbs tumble in an aromatic haze
I dispel just enough mystery

Wishing is a well where want and will
dismisses regimental rhyme
Maybe and then perhaps not do I believe
in free verse; nothing outlasts the annual treadmill
Never a word of where to next

September is a 7 year blog anniversary (see photo post Seven) though I’ve only been posting poems for four of them. By way of a light-hearted celebration I’ve created this muddled erasure poem from the first lines of each verse of these September poems:- (feel free to browse poems via the year links)
September 2015: Soiling Green; Aquarium; The City
September 2016: Houseboat; La Sierra del dragón; Small talk; There’s a wishing well; Darkling summer; Underworld
September 2017: As a bird; The lost park; The mercenary;

With many thanks to all at Poets United with whom I first tentatively shared my poetry and am happy to do so again today with another Poetry Pantry
[obviously there was no intention to reference hurricane ‘Florence’ in the opening lines but am mindful of the awful devastation]