An old poem

It’s national poetry day and I couldn’t pick from the hundreds of favourites I have so I thought I’d go full-narcissus and post one of my own poems, written a couple of summers ago in a fresh water lagoon near Perpignan.

The empty rock, with its hole

And its unhand smooth

Roughness

Round and licked by years

Salt, sweat, tumbling

Down the mountain

The children made golden with

Two months of laziness

Gulp and scream a final weekend

Of stolen merriment

A young man and his lover

Drift along in their inflatable boat

Kept afloat with lungfuls

And the birds have nowhere to nest

Here.

The trees are elsewhere

Our fat, sundial world

A progression of shadows

That's not a fig tree there

The leaves are too jagged,

There are too many veins

A distant child plunges into the water.

This meticulous Everything

Continuing and continuing.