Archaeopteryx

The trees are awake
The fields in furrow
The brown salty earth
Is dug from the burrow
The rabbit makes his home beneath
Where vineyards grow
The wind has teeth

Then opens out the fertile plane
Where land has lain
The fossils remain
Of so many millenia ago
Epochs, eras our clocks cannot know
Of a time when dinosaurs roamed
Now slip-silted down muddy loam
It fell and slipped down a loamy flume
Within minutes the flow had covered its plume

Archaeopteryx half bird, half beast
The link between these two disparate cleats

For the benefit of those who don't know
this dinosaur had feathers
His beak did crow
Even from the other parts we know
This bird had claws from arm to toe

Unlike anything that had gone before
His skeleton opened up many a genetic door
The missing link, the piece of the chain
That would tie down Prehistoric Adam to Cain

What memories of a terror-bound world
Would be released if we could read its skull?
If the tracks and times, and minutes
Were laid down like tree rings
Or the braille-like markings of a limpets shell

Of what world might Archaeopteryx speak?
One of unimaginable beauty, one where terror peaks?
Palm trees as tall as two story buildings
Jungles alive with giant insects and snakes
All creatures inhabiting a godless ocean
With razor sharp teeth leaving devastating wakes

How might he have lived?
What aerobatic skill?
To evade the predators clutch,
Or to make his own deadly kill
How did he hone his technique?
Where was his school?
At what did he pique?
Were there extremes in plenitude?
Mountainous relief?
Did he witness an earthquake divide and fold?
Did a volcanic eruption turn his world cold?
Were there rains for days, did it hail stones?
Was there room for beauty or mere survival alone?
When and how did the butterfly come to be?
How did such a delicate beauty from the beast flee?
What of the flower, why is it here?
How can an hour be heard to chime in its ear?
What possible claim do we have to this earth?
How can we name it ours?
By whose power do we say we have worth?

Book line and sinker

You caught me book line and sinker
With that sentence of yours
Turned my cheeks a bit pinker
With that fish verb doing its best
To escape the nets, and nest
Of the dark owl of Grammar

In your forest of words I was lost
For a moment that lasted an hour, or days
I cannot tell,
They were like little bells
Tinkling in the trees of a's and b's
Then like soot
These burnt words fell, their fire
Having died out
Like ash, they lay on the ground
White words pale with memory

I kick them and let the dust fly up in a cloud
Translation is soft, it makes little sound
Remembering understanding is quiet, not loud

White Trunks

Sitting upon a giant trunk
A white leviathan once sunk
Like Moby Dick, caught and weighed
Left its ballein skeleton - sunbleached for days
Trees are like dinosaurs of the hidden valley
Echo back the white chalk cliffs
Which straddle up above the canopy
The semisphere of blue to kiss

Wood peckers drill holes about
Bull ants fill them with their snouts
Searching out the sweetest honey
As pirates seeking out hidden money

All at once the leaves do drop
In an unknown breeze
Like a gentle woman walking by, inexplicable
Ease
The winter comes as Summer's release

Just passing through

Oh what a perfect morning
Just passing through
The valley in the early dawning
Reds and pale yellow leaf hues

Insects in the bright meadow
Appearing out of hill shadow
Buttercup and clover
And low thorn bush cover

The slope and the pines
Keeping ancient time
With the Sun's clock
That awakens them from a dream
So shallow

Its dial winds and the birds awake
A brand new morning to make

Orchestral movements

There they come with their flutes and violins
As they walk in
Like a hot knife through butter
They cut her
They fill the Cathedral atmosphere
With tones uplifting in the air

And smartly dressed in suit and tie
In black lapels, collars that would fly
If they were not buttoned down
In formal attire
The occasion calling for its desire

Calling for Hosanna to come down from above
Calling to praise the public square doves
Calling the broken, the lame and the sick
Calling them all within the walls thick

Unbroken symphonies of sound
The memories of lives once lost
Now found

In the ruins of the church
Long after the Turkish Wars
When Christianity knelt low
Yet stronger seeds would somehow sow

Then calling you back from imagined histories
To the present day mysteries
Of the hot knife cutting
The voice from a milk bottle chested singer
Singing in a cage - the church
Within a cage - her ribs
Within a cage - her heart
Like a bird on a perch

To what heights can the human heart soar?
On the days remembering the war?

A Boring poem

Ruth was over the moon, she was an astronaut
Barry was down in the dumps, he was a recycling operative
Norman was under the weather, he was a meteorologist on holiday
Faith was keeping her money for a rainy day, she was married to Norman
Bill was taking the plunge, his toilet was blocked
Gertrude was footing the Bill, she was bill's chiropodist
Nancy was washing her hands of him, she was Tony's nurse
Tony had a bone to pick with her
But he chose the wishbone, and Jill told him to pull the other leg
But Francis broke a leg, he wasn't a chicken when he plucked up the courage
To walk the boards
However Sally got stage fright when she saw a deer with antlers
And the dog had a nervous tick, it wasn't prepared to suck his blood
Cathy was given the cold shoulder by the butcher
There were no flies on him, he used deoderant

No man's land

It was long ago and I had lost the feeling of the fall
The broken tambourine played by the hand
Was knocked against the wall
The shake of bells
The sound of drums
As the mourners come
And all hell breaks loose in the streets
The day that Kingdom comes

It was long ago and darkness
Filled the waking hour
Two thieves stalked in the night
Up the stairs of the white marble tower
One just wanted honesty
To be paid in bell flowers
The other wanted innocense returned
From foreign powers

I saw the thing from a distance
And shot a shooting glance
That echoed with all the resistance
That could be mustered outside of France
And laughing said oh well
I'll tell the bell to toll
And it will ring for them who dance
In the midnight of their soul

A few were lucky they did escape
The room which filled with black
When soldiers of the unseen vision
Started to come back
A few were not and fought
With their dying thought
That what if dying is like drought
As Drinking was to thought
That what if dying means the end of all
These foreign wars
Which keep the soul away from home
And locked up of outdoors