In the cinema garden
Under an orange parasol
Drinking a flat white like fine wine.
Coloured pennants flutter in the breeze
A shoal of bright fishes
And pastel flowers flutter too
Yellow, blue and white.
These are not the ancient times
Yet I seek a place of quiet knowing
Like the sages of the distant east.
Poetry
At the green table
Early morning
Sitting at the green table under a grey-white sky
Hen blackbird startles on the garden wall.
Reading my second-hand book on Kodojin
Japanese literatus out of time
I sense the sky lighten
Time and again –
Glancing up nothing changed.
Heart flight
High
Above the conifer plantation
With its shadow dark heart
And high above the wide meadow
Where the golden pheasant foraged
Last time I came this way.
High
Hang two buzzards
Riding the gentle air.
I open out my seeing
Till it’s wider than the sky
And the buzzards soar
In the open space
That is me.
I choose one of them.
She flies in the expanse of my wide vision
Then I let this exquisite sensing
Drop into the awareness of my heart.
An unthought knowing
Wide as the endless blue.
Each wing flap
One, two, three, four
Then the strong, still glide
I feel
In the big field of my heart sight.
Each wing beat
And glide
Ripples me
As it ripples the high, wide air.
I tilt and move with the bird.
She flies me.
I close my eyes
To see if I can follow
The bird’s movements
Without sight
But I quickly lose her.
I find her again
Then move off up the road
Still she soars in the expanse of my heart
Till a roadside stream
Distracts me
And she is gone
And I don’t notice the moment of her going.
Image ©James Duncan
Yellow Catkins
The earth’s pull is held in their hanging
Unseen bonds join
Catkins to the earth.
The pull binds them to the damp soil.
The catkin and the ground
Two poles of the same.
And their swinging.
The nudge of the wind on one catkin
And then another.
The nudge and the swing
The catkin and the wind
Are one whole.
The swing is held in the pull.
The pull is constant
The swing is for a moment.
Pull is weight
The sway so light.
The body of the catkin
Is delicate to the touch.
My finger tip brushes it
A caress.
A thousand hanging tails
Swinging in the breeze
Caught in the pull of the earth.
And the brush of my touch.
And the curve of a bough
Of so many boughs
Arching out from the root
Reaching out over the fence.
Old, wet, moss laden, bark clad.
The curve is a dance with the pull of earth
The reach is a dance with the life of sun
The sway is a dance with the movement of air.
The curve, the reach, the sway
The silent dance of earth, sky and tree
Held in the space of this moment
Between the Hazel and I.