This year the butterflies will return,
Summer-soft and warm,
Their enchanting transience
Lightness and intensity in exquisite combination.

In downy, paper-thin gowns
They’ll brush the air and dance prettily,
Teasing, captivating, elusive –
‘For one season only’.

We forget, of course, that they are not the same butterflies.
Momentarily eternal and fresh with new life,
They are orphans too,
The tattered children of the dead year.

Yet it is hope, not time, which is their gift,
They choose life over memory, life over regret.
And so in summer’s fleeting embrace,
They will dance on regardless.

But let’s not rush things;
This year the butterflies will return,
And tomorrow will be.
Today there are snowflakes to attend to.

Vicki Watson © 2014

I am finding it difficult to remember,
Cannot place in my mind the year gone by.
Dates, minutes, days, hours,
Pitched into some dark, eternal hell –
Or else tossed to heaven without a second thought.

Were they valuable, those days?
Was there joy or despair between earth and sky?
Did we rage and war?
Was there compassion?
Did we learn to dance?

One cannot go back to check these things, of course;
There are no salvage expeditions here.
Time tugs at our sleeves
And we must obey.
We follow the rules.

Yet somewhere inside,
Finding refuge amongst the empty spaces,
Lodged between forgotten spring and lost winter,
A truth, a sure wisdom remains,
Housed in a single, perfect grain.

And, holding the grain in my hand,
It is enough.

Vicki Watson © 2013

Your eyes stare at me from under your matted hair,
The layers of dirt and neglect even deeper than pity or shame.
You do not question me; there is neither wonder nor curiosity there.
Nor do you ask, plead, beg.
Why should you?
It's too late and yet too early for that.
And your old, accusing look has been replaced
By a blank stillness.

But those eyes.
Even frozen, you are more alert, more alive than I,
I in my winter boots and long scarf.
It is strange to think that
Whilst living has eluded one of us,
Dying has escaped the other.
And it's hard to tell which is which.

Sparks jettisoning into the crisp blackness,
A vivid orange against the backdrop of ebony silence,
Fairies of fire, winging their way home
On an unexpected breeze.

The bonfire a crackle, at once dangerous and comforting,
A furnace ablaze with light, livid and burning with raw energy,
Luring its annual admirers ever closer,
As moths to a flame.

The people, hatted and be-scarved, huddle, cluster,
Sparklers whirling before them, glitzy with extravagance,
Their wispy signatures hanging in the air, short-lived
And fading, fading into nothing.

And only now the fantasia of fireworks commences,
The artist experimenting with line, with colour, his audience captive,
And then at once, a dazzling fountain of jewelled light: ruby, jade, opal, sapphire,
A painting of shimmering castles in the sky.

And a middle-aged man with his son, glove to mitten; in his arms, a daughter,
Her bright gaze betraying the hands over her ears,
A snapshot of dizzy delight, breathless and enchanting,
A simple picture of rare beauty.

Later, with the remnants and debris of the evening lying discarded,
Dying, the brave bonfire, now petered out, sizzles and smoulders,
A scarlet and amber glow lingering on,
Still warm with the memories of youth.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2012

I have forgotten what it is to breathe
Deeply and long,
To drown in the sharp, cold hit of an autumn morning,
And luxuriate in the slow exhaling.

I have forgotten what it is to walk
Barefooted and bare-legged in the rain,
Across a field where the soft mud envelopes my toes
And dries a smooth brown.

I have forgotten what it is to stand,
Wind-buffeted and laughing on the precipice,
Sipping celebratory wine from a flask,
And impervious to the lure of the long drop.

I have forgotten what it is to sit in the park at twilight,
Lie face-down in the snow,
Sing softly in an empty street,
Swim underwater and naked in the sea,
Turn consecutive cartwheels across a late summer meadow.
Be held so tightly I can scarcely breathe.

But forgetting, of course, is the easy part.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2013

Ignorant of the whole, one cannot mourn the loss of the half,
Despair has no foothold, loneliness no grip,
Until that half is found, recognised, loved.
And lost.

Is a half, unaware that it is such, then whole?
And on discovering that it has only ever been but one of two,
Must it forever live its half-life
With no hope for completion, for fulfilment?

copyright Vicki Watson 2013

This house was washed away weeks ago.
Freak storm or tidal wave or something;
One of those natural disasters.
I was sleeping, so I didn’t notice.

Look out of the window and you’ll see I’m right.
We’re mid-Atlantic now perhaps,
Not beyond help, yet too far to be seen,
The visible invisible.

I’ve gotten to love these waves,
The lap, lapping sway and the cabin headache,
The bluster of wind and spume, flung against cold glass
Like snow from a gun.

It floats, obviously, this house,
And the watermark is lower than the letterbox,
So everything’s fine, just fine,
And there’s not the slightest chance of drowning.

‘Solid construction, energy efficient, built to last’ –
Those builders knew their stuff inside out,
And I have enough supplies to last until tomorrow,
Which is all that matters, isn’t it?

Do you fancy a cuppa? I’ll put the kettle on.
I’ve thought of everything, you see.
It’s just as well I turned the house inside out
Before the weather changed.

Vicki Watson © 2014

She crammed her head full of clutter,
A fragment of this,
A snippet of that,
Nuggets of unnecessary knowledge
To fill the expanse.

And books.
Notebooks,
Small, large, spiral-bound,
With lines or or, better still,
Plain.
Blank.
Ready for filling, and she filled them all.

It took a lifetime.

And once the spaces were finally full,
She was comforted by their strangely suffocating warmth,
And only sometimes allowed herself to wonder
What it would have been like
To have left some pages blank,
And have faced that vast expanse.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2013

I'm a runaway writer, the wolf of the pack,
In pursuit of the thought as the words seem to stack
One on top of another like bricks in a wall,
Like a tower, an Empire, answer the call.
But the rhythm keeps flowing, the rhyme never ends,
Like a postroom of mailbags when one letter blends
To the next in succession, a fleeting affair,
A romantic illusion, with no time to spare
On the sentiment, rushing, the train careers on,
Full of people and packages, memory and song.
With a sting in the tail, there's a transfer of weight,
Or a pause for a second . . . never too late.
It's a race in my head, it's a storm, it's a game,
And it carries me on but is never the same.
The soaring of seagulls, the roaring of rhyme,
It's a pattern that's pawing and clawing at time
Yet immerses itself in the verse of a thought,
And the fish, by the seagull is suddenly caught.
And they say it's forever, a language in stone
But the pages of people are gradually blown
One away from the other, too far and apart
To act with conviction, to play their own part.
And the words from the waves to the wind they are tossed,
And in one single moment, the poem is lost.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2012

I have shut myself inside this box.
Sealed it well, from the inside,
And filled the cracks.

I fashioned it myself,
Based it on a model I devised long ago.
I remembered the dimensions intimately.

And inside I am safe.
Inside, I can hardly be seen.
The art of invisibility is slowly and carefully learnt.

Copyright Vicki Watson 2013

The angels come more frequently now,
Their visits like spring primroses,
Full of five-petalled, open-palmed beauty and quiet energy,
An unexpected surprise.
For they will come again; persistence is a virtue, it seems,
And I’m not quite lost yet.

They smile encouragingly and their sparkling laughter fills the void;
It lingers in the memory.
And with them I can breathe full-lung and be joyful,
Shout and dance naked in the street if I like.
Or dye my hair blue.

But of course I don’t.
Because for now I am content to let them fill my soul with wonder,
To be their angel in return,
And to wait for next year’s blooms.

Copyright © 2013 Vicki Watson