I have real pleasure in sharing with you the entries in our Mon Cafe Poetry on the Radio challenge, set by poet Fiona Owen a few weeks ago. Many thanks to all our participants and to Fiona for encouraging these creative acts!
For more info on Mon Cafe’s periodic creative challenges on Radio Mon FM, check out : https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mon-Cafe/183871505107178?fref=ts
NOW AND THEN
I
Just a short jog to the June river
From our house in Thamesford, Ontario
Where pink peonies edge the driveway.
A box yew stands sentinel at the front door and
Being of Welsh origin we are the only cartref on
The block with a privet hedge marking a boundary.
Once we pass the hedge there are five more homes
Where we can smile at the neighbours sitting in
Their aromatic Adirondack chairs on painted porches.
Then we cross the River Road, enter the parkway and hear
The Thames tributary chortling along in expectation of its descent
Via a shallow waterfall to scuttle south under a road bridge and on.
II
In some ways, I am lost walking down Byron Avenue in June.
For over forty years I have forsaken this place as Wales calls
To me and I answer–with a suitcase and some waiting poems.
If I was there now I could follow my bliss and solemnly stroll
Down Pont-y-Capel Lane where fragrances of wild flowers
Leeks and linden capture my senses and carry me back in time
To childhood and Sunday morning strolls with my father.
This is Father’s Day and bluebells ring out their message
Of constancy, and honeysuckle spreads abundance and devotion.
A curlew lingers and haunts the space, a skylark cries.
The month of June, when the dew in Wales is heaviest
Begets the tears of my saddest day–my father’s early death.
III
Afon Alyn remembers our shadows and our brightness,
Our coming and our going, as cosy trees shroud over her
like a blue-green mantle in the twilight. While young foxes
Saved from road-kill, raised in captivity, now grown and free
Also remember us. And I too am free to be where I am.
Two countries, two homelands, in my head and heart.
© Beryl Baigent
Residents and Prisoners
Confined by weather, instead
I watch. The empty garden seats
settle back, bask in the rain.
They look expectant.
And visitors do come. Little
brown jobs – flycatchers? – hover
round the shrubs vibrating their wings
drab hummingbirds.
Snazzy cock pheasant saunters out
from behind the greenhouse,
crosses the lawn and stalks
right up to the window to peer in.
A blackbird commandeers
the fence just long enough for
a single rendering of his signature tune:
quick assertion of property rights. Then off.
And bees – more bees than I saw
all last summer – assiduous
as Japanese tourists at one hedge
of cotoneaster, though the buds are barely open.
But now an unlucky nuthatch, a scruffy
fledgling, panics into the greenhouse,
pinballing off the glass. Visitor
turned prisoner. I creep over,
leave the door open, cross my fingers.
Stevie Krayer
17 June 2013
Out of Synch… by Pauline Kenyon
This year the seasons are all jumbled
Flowers do not know their place,
They’re popping up in flowerbeds
Like some weird kind of race.
There’s blossom bursting skyward
Whilst the bluebells bloom below
Amongst azaleas and wallflowers
Brightly petalled as they grow.
The irises are gleaming –
With pansies pushing through
The yellowing leaves of daffodils
Glist’ning in the morning dew.
The clematis is high climbing
With blooms as big as dinner plates
As the weeds and grass zoom upwards
And tenacious bindweed gyrates.
What a tapestry of colour
A magic carpet of delight,
Despite the seasonal mayhem
Everything is quite all right!
The Furthest Edge
We lay under a tree
at the edge of the shining buttercupped field,
smelt greenness and May blossom.
Looked up through fresh, lace leaves
to the ocean-blue sky.
A blackbird voiced our joy.
But high above the living tree
were bare boughs thrusting up,
sombre, stencilled black against the sky.
Then, staring longer, we could see
a thousand glistening spiders’ webs
adorning every gnarl and fork,
swaying in the breeze.
And we imagined we beheld,
up there above our heads,
a hidden, dark, mysterious world,
a busy, scuttling pouncing place
at the very furthest edge
of the shining, sun-reflecting buttercups.
Joy Mawby 14.6.13
LIGHT OF DAY
In a first pink sky,
Unfurled, unformed, unstretched,
Our dawn of life is soft and thin,
Uncertain, curled in hidden possibility.
Light washes in a morning of colour,
A burst of buds, a promise of petals.
The shadows shorten.
Energy floods
And the grand rotation of the sun
Finds it vertical at noon,
Immediate,
A furious brilliance of light
With shadows short,
Acute and sharp.
At dusk the leaves are still
In shadow and translucent;
They gain a green they lost in the midday glare.
I see their shapes and how they have grown,
And the sky is the colours of any rose I have ever seen
In my life.
ANDREW WILLIAMSON
Eli Acheson-Elmassry, Artist 