Friday 25 July 2014

A Cup of Cherries


Outside the kitchen, from the bench,
you look up into branches that you might call –
were they human – over-enthusiastic.

Sparrows, finches occupy
a wooden cascade.
Let them have their gluttony.

Their chirping arguments
are a kind of drama.

When it’s time again,
we'll remember –
go out picking with plastic bowls,
put cups of cherries on the sideboard.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Friday 18 July 2014

The Piper



Intrigued by affinities,
we’re talking again
on a favourite theme:  
how traversing
reputed distances
we keep stumbling
across common ground.

Maybe here’s something
we might take for a clue:
suggestive plangencies,
bagpipe music,
exiled to the shores
of Celtic Europe,
held tight to
in the Rhodope Mountains.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Friday 11 July 2014

July Morning


How light works to bring back world
and summer put on rash splendour:
such homecomings and departures
as city rooftops shield appear –
as they might rightly be – adventure.

Not so much grateful for small mercies
as learning to spot small miracles,
you’ll be savouring thick coffee smells
and prospects of a day unfolding
into distant car-horns, rumorous traffic

as colour glides in to repossess
the crags and angles of night’s canyons.


Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 


Friday 4 July 2014

Old Trees


Somewhere, not far inside the gates,
but not so far beyond the artificial pond,
its muddy cusps slimed with frog spawn,
I’d be little more than five years old
and struck by the lightning-split trunks,
the furred bark, the sheer age of trees.

Like that sliced-through giant Redwood
in the Natural History Museum
with rings picked-out marking dates
of human events, it wasn’t so much
our frailty they brought to mind
as their own solidity, their endurance.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips