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After That, Silence, by Guy Fletcher

31/8/2016

She lights a candle in the church,
a tear drops and drips on the orange flame
flickering like the faraway stars
indifferent in the frightening night sky.
She recites yet another prayer
sometimes doubting if there are any lights
in the many mansions or if they've always been empty
remembering the poignant words of C.S.Lewis

who lost his beloved to cancer
imploring God to save his wife
concluding, "After that, silence."
She wonders if her faith, now flickering
like the candle, will soon turn to smoke
and disappear...into the endless ether.

A Lunchtime Walk To Nan Shin Temple, by Ian Fletcher

26/8/2016

On my walk from the new high school
built to serve the expanding suburbs
of this great modern city of Taichung
it is a humid ninety-three degrees
a sweltering day in central Taiwan
without the mercy of a cooling breeze.
Crossing the wasteland to the temple
which sits there in splendid isolation
a jewel glimmering in the midday sun
I am Coward’s archetypal Englishman.

In the courtyard several stray dogs doze
owing their lives to the care of the monks
benign masters to whom all life is sacred.
This venerable temple is deserted today
though it hasn’t always been this way
for three centuries ago it was the heart
of a community of farms and villages
long since vanished and the worshippers
who once toiled in surrounding fields
lie beneath the soil in unknown graves.

I enter and pausing before the shrine
stand under the statue of Mazu’s gaze.
As her ever open eyes meet mine
I have a sense the goddess smiles
compassionately and welcomes me
with the serene look of eternity.
Leaving the temple the distant city
shimmers insubstantially in the haze
the world now seeming impermanent
and my daily life unreal and transient.

The whole afternoon and beyond
I am haunted by this lonely temple
and imagine the goddess Mazu
looking forever on day after day
long after I have passed away.

Hedd Wyn, by Guy Fletcher

23/8/2016

Many Welsh soldiers are buried here,
a white stone memorial poignantly states
"Their name liveth for evermore"
to the sound of cows by Artillery Wood Cemetery
on this summer morning when Flanders Fields
seems incapable of such bloodshed
but it was hell a century before
in the brutal days of the First World War.

I read the poem "Rhyfel" to a group
as we stood by Hedd Wyn's grave, Welsh flag fluttering,
and although it was such a long time ago
I felt tears well-up in my eyes.
He won the "Chair" at the Eisteddfod
but it was posthumous, a tragic tale,
and I peer at graves, many with no name
but we have learned nothing and that's our shame.

I stare at the grave of an unknown soldier
and imagine the letters he might have written to his ma
longing to drink ale with friends in his local
and wake with fresh sheets on a sunny morn.
A red rose petal rots on verdant grass
a reminder of the transience of life,
so sad how many young men had to fall,
some graves visited...and some not at all.

One Evening, by Eric Smith

21/8/2016

Beyond the curtain
The colossal orange moon
Climbs above the tree line
East of the barn
Illuminating the cornstalks and
Flooding the yard with light
Revealing scores of bats
Careening crazily in erratic laps
Seeking, finding, feeding on insects
Twenty feet over the dark ground.

Dark Thoughts At The Monk's House, by Guy Fletcher

18/8/2016

The garden is beautiful, alluring,
a rainbow of flowers to feast her eyes,
but when angry clouds came sweeping
into her fragile artistic soul
Virginia could barely write a sentence,
for the terrible torturous voices inside her head
were relentless, murdering creativity.
Yet her novels have stood the test of time:
classics such as Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse,
and I picture her smoking a cigar
with wonderful words pouring from her pen,
but the winds of madness began to blow...once more,
so with pockets of stones she made her way
to the Ouse, which strangled her life away.

The Hay Wain, by Ian Fletcher

18/8/2016

This charming pastoral painting
graces many a living room wall
giving suburban man a glimpse
amidst anxious or stressful hours
of a world he’s lost beyond recall
if indeed it ever existed at all
transporting him to a rural scene
a ford on the languid River Stour
where a hay wain is crossing
the waggoners having paused
to let their dray horses quench
their thirst while a piebald dog
watches from the western shore
downwards from the old cottage
outside which a woman washes
clothes in these pellucid waters.
Smoke rises from the chimney
on the red-tiled roof suggesting
a homely domestic hearth within.
Two ducks paddle unperturbedly
between the wain and a solitary man
fishing on the verdant eastern bank
his boat moored amongst the reeds.
Beyond lies an expansive meadow
where distant reapers are mowing
the grass to be borne by the wain
to some local barn, the store of hay
for the winter several months away.
Tall centuries-old poplar trees loom
over the cottage, themselves dwarfed
by cumulus clouds that fill the sky
presaging a late afternoon shower
but not quite yet at this midday hour
on this summer’s day of another age
where time is spent in honest toil
with nature harnessed and tamed
but not exploited, gently resisting
yet rewarding the efforts of those
who at the end of their humble lives
return to the soil of this pleasant land
through which flows the River Stour.

Monday, by Jenna Pope

16/8/2016

Monday arrives
with a veracity
unlike any other
day of the week.

Reliable,
expected,
entirely unwanted.
Pressures clustered into
unmanageable time slots.

Unrelenting needs,
none your own,
lined up with
boatloads
of stresses,
strains and necessities,

All crying out for
completion
that only you
can satisfy.

The Optimist, by Ian Fletcher

14/8/2016

The guy seems so sanguine
he’s like a walking cliché
a person who can perceive
silver linings in every cloud
whose cup’s always half full
when mine’s forever half empty
who looks at this vale of tears
through his rose-tinted glasses
being not the kind of man to feel
those chill winds that blow
from the grave or the guilty pain
from the wasted years of long ago
or think of the future stretching
forth like a desert without an oasis
or the present as living in a nightmare
like Munch’s figure on the bridge
for he regards such pessimism
as without basis and mentally
unsound, if he understands it at all,
yet I give thanks that while trapped
in the prison of my earthly days
this bland optimist is still around.

The Bedroom Window, by Ian Fletcher

10/8/2016

From their bedroom window I observe
the silver birch across the back garden
a swirling late autumn breeze
stripping the old tree of its leaves
which unswept have obliterated
the patch of grass below
the very same tree they would have seen
undrawing their curtains in dawns long passed
when the grass there was still green,
but this is late afternoon and the garden
has changed from when this place was known
not as ‘my parents’ house’ but my home.

Nothing remains the same and so it is here
with everything neglected and overgrown
weeds ravaging the flowerbeds once
nurtured and tended by my mother
until her last illness kept her indoors.
Now I am an inheritor, debating whether
to sell the house that binds me to it still
as if under some dark parental spell.

Yet this garden is peopled only with my
memories and there are no ghosts
haunting the uncut lawns and the flowerbeds
only the leaves from the silver birch
falling
layer upon layer
onto the back lawn
burying the scenes from long ago
as I look out of the bedroom window.

Invisible Cocoon, by Jenna Pope

8/8/2016

When I am feeling
harried,

demanded upon

and bothered,

I weave a cocoon

around myself
in invisible stitches

of no entry.

There I stay until

I am able to find order

in my chaos,

light in my gloom

and

reconciliation

in my being.

Chaos, by Eric Smith

8/8/2016

Beliefs
Become untrue
Come untied
Metaphors mixed
Beyond cognition
Constructions resisting
Favorable Interpretation
Leaves us where?
Disappearing into vortexes,
Gathering storms
Of last reckoning
Where facts fail
Comprehension fades
Passion depleted
Wanders aimless

The Darkened Room, by Guy Fletcher

8/8/2016

One curtain is drawn, the other only half
as if a squinting eye staring at me.
The small Welsh flag remains in the window sill
although the tournament is long since over
and the car in the drive she’ll never use again
as I wander past on a sunny summer evening,
such a stark contrast to the darkened room
which has the look of death, the reek of doom.

Can it really be only a few months ago
we talked of Tchaikovsky and other concerts
as she strode up the street with joy?
But everything is transient and uncertain
and so petty woes I now let melt away
like morning dew when the sun rises.
My vulture eyes peer in the darkened room,
there is no movement, it’s quiet as a tomb.

I do not believe she’ll return again
wondering if the hospital will test her faith
or perhaps she’s beyond cognitive thoughts
lying in the ghastly light of the isolation ward.
I feel sorrow but we are selfish
a reminder of my own mortality.
Does her ghost drift across the darkened room
under the stars and the indifferent moon?

Poetry

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