This week they came.
The winds were perfect:
strong, high, northwards,
washing the Sahel to the Arctic.

Hatched way up in the Atlas mountains
emerging
from dark cracks
compelled into the Moroccan spring,
warmed and pulsing
on silk tissue wings
they catch the promise of our flowers.

Even the radio reported them
arriving by the million,
warned of scattered showers
of falling butterflies, in the south.

White,
painted rust,
black-veined
vermillion,
Painted Ladies falling
hungry and arriving
a million Painted Ladies
falling, mesmerising.

let me hover
above the thin film of life
be the magnet
that white flowers seek out
be the beating of a million
falling painted wings
on that scented African wind

a million beating wings
on that scented African wind
soft rhythm
beating
a million painted wings
soft rhythm
beating
a million painted wings
soft
rhythm
beating.

Dark Abstraction
(from a Goergia O'Keeffe painting)

We are line and colour
bound by the thinnest of seams;
always an edge, a thread of light
defines us. We meet, we never join.

We don't view the same picture.
One of us sees seepage, the sinuous slide,
the other beholds line and colour, the smooth fit.

Our landscape is dusk, mist rising,
never a moon. Whispers, the lightest breath.
No-one could know ehat lies beneath.

You, slate blue, layered
to a darker heart.
Me, the flush of a dying sun.

Beginning Again

Pots washed, dried, put away.
She set the dial,
Are you sitting comfortably?
Full of rabbit stew we settled.

Shall I begin?
Mum and I listened together, me swallowing
every sound of story
until the word goodbye,

the pips shifted us into afternoon
and she was gone,
out of bounds to me,
into the crimplene factory.

Sent to be schooled I grew to be
a child of everywhere;
a short cut through barbed wire,
the fields across Four Counties Hill

the disued anti-aircraft station,
the sudden gift of snowfall, that
drift-shut roads and school;

no electricity,
only the wireless.
We settled,

listened,
sounded out the depth of drift,
beginning again.

Guard Hairs

You think I'm white, but all you see is bear
and I'm hidden from you not by snow,
though heaven-knows there's still enough of that,
but by the fields your thoughts cross.

Know my skin is black, absorbing all the little heat
I can from the infrequent sun.
My hairs like light-pipes, guide the warmth
to where I need it, in the muscle.

They're like the see-throuh flakes that fall
and pile in these white fields and dunes.
Whether I walk, or swim, or hole up in
a birthing den - the inuit call it Iglu -

I am still bear and fear only other bears.
You men, with cracking tools that sound like ice,
leave easy food when seals are scarce.
I broke a claw on where you keep your waste.

Only the seal-smell Inuit know us well.
They know we walk like men,
talk when we've a mind to, tell them
what we know. It's now of little use,

but when we walk with four sure feet across the flows,
swim to where the seal and walrus are,
we know we're neither white, nor black
but like so many things, transparent.

Dare

My father's rack of pipes
up there and me down here wondering
just what tobacco actually is,
that smells so sweet, of him, his jacket
he wears to work, and how it would be
to choose one pipe, one shape and tap
it in my palm, to have his leather pouch,
unzip, pinch some moist strands and fill the bowl;
squash it firm with my small thumb.
I'd have his lighter, flick the top,
grate the wheel, feel its grit on flint,
see a yellow flame leap out and start
a burn - a glow before I dared to plunge
that end between my lips, taste smoke
and him, then tilt my head to blow
a magic father's cloud with pride.

Electric Fence

Oak, ivy, sloe
hawthorn berry, Scots pine, wild rose...

But apples cuffed on cordons,
ornamental birch from China,
soft fruit in polytunnels?
Where do you draw the line?

Home-made shed,
recycled timber snug
under laminated sheets
of polycarbonate,
guttering extruded aluminium
from a hell-hole mine in Georgia -
where do you draw the line?

Stacked logs drying
under corrugated iron,
compost clamp
built of tanalised pine
from Russia,
rainwater harvested
in plastic,
vegetables (organic)
under natural seaweed blanket,
note: the sea is thirty miles away -
where do you draw the line?

Flat green lawn
uniformity achieved
by motor mower (manufactured)
so much more convenient than sheep,
path deep in chippings
from a petrol-driven shredder,
bug hotel of birch trunks
brought down by chainsaw -
where do you draw the line?

Bucolic queue of cows
electric fenced, plods past,
to have their teats manipulated
by machine
beneath a stand of
carbon fibre turbine blades.
But it's okay -
they're camouflaged in green.