What Boys Think About Dreams
Reading The BFG in my Grade 3 classroom in China, discussing how the giant bottles up dreams. Sensitive, overweight, shy Chinese boy asks: Do dreams die? (He dreams of fast food and being loved.) Fiery-haired ferret-fast third-culture Brit is convinced: Yes, they get used up. Simple. (He dreams of sports glory and growth spurts.) Paper slim, tree-clambering mountain Swiss boy: You can use dreams three times. (He dreams of saving endangered jungles.) Bespectacled, ill-behaved son of a female CEO states: Dreams disappear whether you like it or not. (He dreams of futuristic travel and seeing his father.) Furiously imaginative, home-work hating German boy: If you don’t use them, they become nightmares. (He dreams of speaking his mind without anger.) The debate continued but was many years ago. Boys all teenagers now, hopefully living the dreams. The Wisdom of Photons But the dark embraces everything: shapes and shadows, creatures and me – Rilke I wake up in the middle of the night. A single star winks at me. Photons fired out thousands, maybe millions of years ago, skimming space, slipping solar systems, sneaking past planets—one true beam sometimes bent by the gulp of gravity, but always adhering to its lucky destination. Looking at starlight, I feel the glaring truth: on the long road of Order to Disorder-- a journey of trillions of years uncountable in this fleeting human mind—I am just a flicker, a tiny finger of light and heat, hardly noticeable in this minuscule moment, yet a flame nonetheless, with heat and light and worth and rage. So I must try to shine, shine all the brighter for the dying light I am. I thank the photons for teaching me. What they lack in mass they make up for in wisdom. The Fireflies My wife tells me to go to the car park, to the wooded edge where the night starts. Tiny bold lights lazily carouse the air. One or two at first are amazing enough. Then a cluster. Some come to investigate me, landing on my trousers, blinking approval. I am amazed there is such magic here in the woods of Montagnola, metres from overpriced food for Ferrari drivers, rants, alcohol diffusing any wider awareness. Hesse knew this, he found the fireflies and bemoaned the shrinking of woods. Published in Lunch Ticket May 2021.
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The Cherry Tree
We pick cherries from a tree in Unterbach. A silent local watches us, arms on hips, but there’s no fence, just wild grass. We pluck the cherries in bloody handfuls, warning each other about staining juice, giddy with the Biblical bounty. So many clusters of fruit when you look up at the sky, red-shifting to purple stars. We only take a tiny portion of what the tree tempts. The rest if left to hang too high, rot, or be gathered by the lucky locals, if they can take their hands off their hips. Dreams of Lake Como I dream of your ripples on the lakeshore, ripples of golden waves over golden rocks. Like an Arthurian knight, I am drawn to your waters and hear the Lady chanting in Italian, grail promises of healing, cleansing siren drawing me into your turquoise depths. Fish flit at your hem, some big and unhurried. In some dreams the lake hazes with mist. Your mountains become rumors, your far shore a blur and your ballad takes me back to childhood: playing in moorland rivers and coastal rock pools. Time is upturned in your glacial heart. The waves giggle over rocks and sadness in the polished stones. In other dreams you dress in your jewels:, orange and cream roofed villages piercing tiny ears of land, the isthmus hand of Bellagio dressed in lace strips, steep pearl-topped mountain crows. This is something beyond art, rounder than tabled intentions, deeper than stone worship. What do you think of me? Lucky atoms as near to nothing as can be, an organic moment of punctuation in time’s long sentences. Your eroded indifference is all the more beautiful. My prayers are answered in reflection. Long after I am gone, you will still be Lake Como, but for these dreamy moments, we drink wine from the same earthen Grail. The Cuckoo Stopped Singing Early July and I am stunned by the emptiness of the air. I suddenly miss his bell ringing reminder that nature persists despite our best efforts. He started in early May, that unmistakable nursery rhyme song postering in the tree-dressed stage of our Montagnola apartment block. He sang me back to boyhood, to Epsom Common woods where cuckoos were a distant promise of fleeting residency, the temporary in the seasons, calling a partner in crime to lay an egg patterned with our nature, displacing the righteous, leaving open mouths, always hungry. Rightly secretive these tricksters, afraid to be uncloaked, the confidence scam revealed. I caught a glimpse in late May as he bolted past, fleeing to other haunts where I hear him: the High Alps, the lips of Italian lakes, the confusions of teenage heat. He seems loudest in lazy mid- summer evenings of exposed moons, nostalgic pangs even before leaving. Later in summer, I am saddened by the need to wait until another April. Published in Borderless Journal, May, 2021. Mother and Daughter
A staggering hot July morning in Mont Sur Lausanne. A mother and daughter brave the street together, Mother’s arm holding up her trembling trophy, her daughter dressed for summer, with legs that won’t comply, a body that bounces, puppet on twisted strings. A triumph these two are, ignoring the sun, the stares of pitying onlookers. The collaborative courage that collapses and reforms every step. Here is the very best of all of us. The Same Dance In the same village as Hesse I see the same gnats dancing in the green-lit light of dusk between softly conducting trees, the breeze that’s a ballet’s breath. We see a dance where death stalks the days; a frantic swirl of mating chances, sudden swerve from a chancing dragonfly, clumsy moth staggering into wakefulness. An hour later, the sun limbos below a glowing mountain ridge and the electron excitement fizzes into mystery, leaving a gathering night’s silence. :Published in May 2021 in Verbal Art, Vol 4, #2. My latest poetry collection of published poems, all linked to the several years spent living in Switzerland, being inspired by the poet Rilke. Free to download. Enjoy!
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Poetry Biography:I have had over 70 poems published in the following worldwide magazines and literary journals: A Handful of Stones, Acta Victoriana (Canada), All the Sins (UK), The Amethyst Review (USA), Amsterdam Quarterly (NL) The Blue Nib (Ireland), Bolts of Silk, Borderless Journal, The Brasilia Review (Brazil), Bushfire Literature & Arts Review (US), Cadenza, Cake Magazine, Carillon, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), DASH (USA), Clackamas Literary Review (USA), Cooch Behar Anthology, Dawntreader, Dreamcatcher, The Dillydoun Review, Earth Love, The Ear (US), Eastlit (East Asia), Erbacce, Envoi, Finger Dance Festival, Ginosko, Gloom Cupboard, Hidden Channel, Inlandia Journal, IS&T (Ink, Sweat & Tears), Into the Void (Canada), The Journal, The Lakeview Journal (India), Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Lunch Ticket (USA) The New Writer, One Hand Clapping, Orbis, Oregon English Journal (USA), The Passage Between, Prole, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Sonic Boom (India), Third Wednesday (USA), Of Nepalese Clay (Nepal), New Contrast (South Africa), One Hand Clapping, Opportunity Publishing, The Oregon English Journal (USA) Origami Poems Project (USA), The Paddock Review (USA), Panoplyzine (USA), Paper Swan Press, The Passage Between, The Peacock Journal (USA), Pens on Fire, Poetry Salzburg (Austria), Potomac Review, (USA) Prole, Pulsar Poetry, Rear View Poetry, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Qutub Minar Review (India), Red Ink, Shiela-Na-Gig (USA), South Bank Poetry Magazine, Stand, Waterford Teachers Centre, (Ireland) We Are a Website New Literary Journal (Singapore), Weber - The Contemporary West Review (USA), Windfall (USA), Writing Magazine, Words for the Wild and Verbal Art (India). Archives
March 2024
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