Spontaneously written many many years ago and never revised, my poetry was a form of therapy when life was very ‘challenging.’ I share just six of them with you to show that no matter how bleak the situation, if you keep your feet on the ground and your eyes on the stars – and trust, you will eventually come to the surface and life will become easy again. Promise! June Kidd.
SURVIVAL
Must I forever grind
under the pain of anticipation,
the malignant growth of fear
that night intensifies.
To lie and wait
when there is no beginning
to the end
that starts the perfect day.
J.K.
THE FIGHT BACK
Twisting mercurial turning,
retrograde steps on an ice cold slab,
sinking depths of a tumbling mind
seeking its lair in the moldering earth
where expectation and secret thought
will rot into oblivion.
So, taste conformity, smell restriction,
sense the delicate grip
that primly sucks the optimism of youth.
But guard your soul
for if it becomes ‘conditioned’
then you deserve to die.
(Notice the defiance at the end. This was a challenge to myself.)
J.K.
….
SOMETIME
Some time
when the world has turned into the distance,
when we no longer need to justify,
then we will have acknowledged our death.
And the rhetoric of mornings past
will sing an everglade hymn
to fat jowled priests
whose delivery of regular prayer
ensures that their virtue will never know
the agony of premature movement.
So it will be for fat grey fish
motionless
just out of reach in mountain pools
to wonder
at the uncertainty of love.
J.K.
THE END OF A LIFE.
I could not conform to the uniform sobbing.
Dread, only for a moment stirred echoes of the dark.
The misery seemed like a sudden night,
as fears joined like gatherings mists
and backs sought the walls of caves
for comfort and protection.
I could not conform to the uniform sobbing
but I took your soul to dance with mine
through the long grass.
Did you sense it?
Did you feel the sun on my face,
my outstretched hands
gathering life-giving rays
to quench the thirst of your fear?
I would not weep and add to your burden,
so I took your soul to dance with mine
in the yellow morning light.
I gave you the freedom of that spring morning,
the wind in my hair, earth cool to the touch,
a body light with youth, twisting soft circles of memory.
I could not conform to the uniform sobbing
but I went to the fields
and the gifs I laid at your sick-bed
were the joys of my life.
J.K.
MEMORIES
The wedding was a hollow –
a pressure of expected joy.
She stood inside the dress
and watched confetti die…
J.K.
HOW LONG…
I longed for the time – a definite year.
I asked for the date –
the date of the ending
the change to not wanting
the peace of not needing
a time without feeling
a dullness to aching
the numbing of longing
the draining of passion
of empty emotion –
to kiss with detachment and feel no vibration –
like a timeless succession of waiting for nothing…
But my volatile form is soft with blue edges
and needs the fulfillment of aching and longing
and needing and giving
in laughter and loving
again and again and again…..
J.K.
This is the end of my ‘therapeutic’ outburst of poetry.
Time had moved on and I no longer needed it.
OBSERVATIONS
Soft rain kissed the tear stained cheek
as comely, ample breasted clouds
squeezing stranded sunlight,
had welcomed the flowering of the woman.
Screened in summer leaf – each full moon magnetic,
she had copulated the dance with the newly turned earth,
searching memory for that lost ecstasy.
But winters cloak had ravaged skin,
twinning the aging with smudged colour
running tired creases of disdain
from thin red lips.
Soon, tortoise neck will stretch
and tired eyes engulfed in tissued skin
will open – guarded.
The defiance in her gaze
already denying the climaxing of her days
as she hooks, with scarlet talons,
lumps of cake in afternoon tea shops.
By Dr Paul Barker BSc MBBS DRCOG FRCGP UCDipPalMed
Jack’s Treehouse in the woods (After Frost)
Whose house this was last year or this? For feathered exhibitionists. Set where the silent Sika run, And made by Jack my first-born son. You made this house in childhood, Set deep within the Robin’s wood. You will not see who now resides, Or watch the Nuthatch court his brides. But I still know our …
SOPHIE’S MADE FROM STARDUST
‘Why do you stand so silently?’ my darling Sophie said.
‘It’s because I have so little room that’s left inside my head’.
You see my Sophie’s made from stardust she has Jupiter Arising,
Accelerating briskly through her own event horizon.
That’s why I stand so silently and watch the soaring constellations,
And in my head the tingling of celestial vibrations.
She numbered stars with cobalt gaze at the galaxies nativity,
And spun the very firmament in a haze of creativity,
The Celeste in my celestial, The E in MC Squared,
She’s ranged around the universe, boldly gone where none have dared.
‘And yet you still stand silently’ my darling Sophie said,
But you’re the author of this universe the Lachesis of this thread!
ALL THINGS IN THEIR SEASON
There’s a thicket in the dark wood that the sunlight never sees,
Where stands a copse of Sycamores, a Parliament for trees,
Who swore an oath to Royal Oak, by leaf and by their root,
They’d find a tree that bore for him the single perfect fruit.
The news spread through the forest on the wing and by the beak,
To a small and stunted scrub tree, who was ugly, old and weak,
The wind ignored this lost old tree and no-one knew the reason,
Why her leaves turned sunward as she said ‘all things but in their season’.
The catkins of the Aspen took a fluttering ovation,
Whilst the Lebanon Cedar’s ‘honeypot’ received a commendation,
The Cobnut and the Chestnut were considered close contenders,
Whilst the Greengage and the Pear tree were dismissed as smug pretenders.
And whilst the Parliament of Sycamores made their deliberation.
And the great woods and the mighty boles await their declaration,
An ancient, stunted Scrub tree with faltered leaf and wizened root,
Presented to the Royal Oak her single, perfect fruit.
And the news spread through the treetops from Alder to Sequoia,
A mighty, shaking, soughing voice the first true Woodland choir.
The Royal Oak spoke his decree, now all trees know the reason,
In each of us that perfect fruit, and all things but in their season.
Dr Paul Barker BSc MBBS DRCOG FRCGP UCDipPalMed
FOG
Here the fog is as matted as Sophocles beard,
And it skulks in the yard like a dog,
And Vinny the stockman confides he’s a-feared,
For the ewes are unused to the fog.
Where the picket–post fencing has long given way,
To the blackthorn and bracken and moss,
And there’ll be no more work in the forty today,
For men who are forming the fosse.
And the Rowan and Aspen and Chestnut and Birch,
Are muffled like elderly men,
And the wedding bells quiet in Kimmeridge church,
Till he opens the skies once again.
