Our memory is like a garden, where we spend many hours
Watering fragrant flowers.
Yet sometimes we succeed
In fertilising a weed.
Indeed
We take a perverse delight in watching it grow
Much though
We deny that it is so!
Let not the weed
Seed
Say I,
But learn from it, then let it die,
For if it’s growth you do not control
It will succeed
And choke your soul.
The below first appeared here on 15th August 2015:
“The passage of time muddles the brain, I don’t recall your name.
Perhaps Marie or Melisa, no matter its all the same.
Though some would consider it shocking, it meant absolutely nothing,
You kept on your stockings,
I feared my neighbours knocking.
It signified everything and nothing,
A girl in suspenders and stockings”.
Kevin Morris reading his poem ‘Unrequited’.
I remember the cut-through,
People drew
Graffiti on the fence,
Perhaps deriving a sense
Of power from their obscene scrawls
On wooden walls.
The Sex Pistols featured there, and perhaps the name of some hapless girl
Was inscribed
In lust and pride.
How the years whirl
By.
Now I can not spy
The narrow place
Where I would trace
Nature’s face
In nettle and bramble
As I did scramble
Through the thicket of my mind.
Now I can not find
the old track
That leads back
To whence I came.
A barred gate
Patiently does wait
And beyond it, my fate?
Looking back, I remember the owl did hoot.
What is the route
To a girl’s heart?
Where to start?
The park
Was dark.
You and I talked as we walked
Back to the hall.
I recall
You remarked on the romance of the owl’s cry
But try
As I might
The night
Ended in tea
And me
Alone
At home.
Hyacinths on a gramophone.
Alone
They stood
On polished wood.
Their scent carrying me back
Down childhood’s track.
The flower’s smel
Blossoming in a wishing well
With a plastic handle.
My thought tangles
With the ivy that
In a bowl sat.
As a boy
My goal was joy.
The earth was good as the man.
I can
Recall
Honeysuckle on a garden wall
And roses, their scent
Is long since spent.
My grandfather went away
Yet in my heart he stays
As I lose myself, in spring days
Thoughts of my grandfather mingle with the wind’s sad cadence, as it shakes my windows.
Acorns, fur cohns and conkers strew the forest floor. Many have fallen from the branches which overhang the pavement.
The feel of nature’s bounty in my coat pockets as I walk home. Conkers to be put away in drawers to harden, acorns for planting in grandfather’s garden.
You told me that weather cohns (you called the fur’s fruit that, or do I confuse the seeds with those of the pine tree?) open to signify fine weather and close to portend storms. Was it an old wive’s tale?
The acorn I planted in the garden which grew into a tree. You didn’t have the heart to tell me that, by chance a weed had rooted where, I hoped an oak would stand. .
I still have your cufflinks in a box, safe in a drawer.
Thud, the sound of a ball being kicked against the wall drifts up to me, as I lie in the dormitory.
Me sick but strangely content to lie abed while my fellow pupils play below. The room is peaceful save for the distant noise of the ball. A gentle breze stirs the curtains. I read, perhaps Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
Oh the tranquillity, would that I could be ill more often.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
A girl on a crowded train. Her scent, jasmine oil fills my senses, carrying me back to yesteryear.
Your long dark hair scented with jasmine. Your perfume lingering on, engrained in pillows long after you where gone.
K Morris - Poet 