We sweat out our jetlag on the streets around Thanjavar.
Here graceful GrandMothers sit in dusty lanes.
Tiny girls scurry out of school laughing
They are caught in embrace,
Tucked between the legs of parents on scooters and two wheeled away.

The harbour is full of boats I haven’t rocked, and have yet to sink.
I would rather float in a calm sea and let sharp-teethed fish nibble my feet.
Delight in well-fed feral cats with whom I practice Greek.
Ensure the little flightless crow that wanders our porch has a drink.
Hang my loves tee-shirts out to dry and tell him once again, how good he looks in pink.

Kind island

Last night a gale and the shutters were in relentless battle.
Doors rattled
You hit your head on the window frame
All seems rearranged.

Kind island windswept and golden
Clouds lie low in your valleys
Fine white lilies carpet your beaches.
Their smell frenzying the cats, their tails up with delight
Fabled olive trees, the young ancients,
Silver now with new growth.
A single hot flower holds itself open,
The last before Autumn sets the sun.

Grief arrives like a mist across the fields.
Bees brave the morning chill to work the last of the marjoram.
The suprise swallow nest, above the shop door, is empty.
There's a metal taste in my mouth.
It's like the tea I used to get from the Friends stall at my local hospital.
Left.
Over-stewed.
Late Summer throws her gifts at us with outrageous generosity.
Plenty beyond reason
Harvest beyond measure.

I lost heart in family life long ago
It always sets me floundering against a current,
unsure of how to play my part.

I offer an arm to a neighbour
Whose daughter raised your
Straight-backed golden boy.

I listen to her backward-looking stories,
Feel her isolation
Like a forwarning of things to come.

You, my dear, are becoming leaner.
Your footfall on the stairs is quicker.
The bones in your face show the shape of you.
You talk of hunger and hunting.

I want to **** reassurance from you like a syringe.
Singe you name into my skin.
Freeze your love alongside too abundant vegetables.
Put you down, so you are wounded and needy.
Pin you to my heart
Like a brooch found in a park somewhere
Trampled by many feet.
Out on too many rainy nights
To refuse a good rescue when it sees one.

I am wrapped in sameness, love.
You often ask me the names for flowers and trees.
I like to take you arm.
We always welcome the breeze.

When you reach for me,
On a path walking past familiar fields,
Noticing small changes,
Different fences, more land planted,
Or walking to a silent meeting,
where we might chat gently
To others who we are coming to know better,
Our bodies know how they best fit together
So that we can continue to move forward.
Its like a dance we perfect all the time.
I half turn to face you
Your hands on my waist.

Sometimes there's a tweek,
A small change,
An action more fluid,
A feeling of acomplishment,
Like a word used in a different language,
when its learnt,
and ours to speak.

In the corner of the garden, in a tree
A squirrel feasts on cobnuts.
It throws half to the ground to rot.
Selects the best of plenty.

The tree is so big now that its pushing against our stone wall, they say.
Slowly, over time, displacing it.
Exchanging its soft Cotswold boundaries with trunk and bark.

We have fattened ourselves on contentment.
The leaner times come in it seems.
I fear I'll lose you and no matter how much I relentlessly reshape,
I can't be sure or certain.

I dream of plain planks in a nunnery cell.
Rough grey blankets against my skin. Feet on a concrete floor.
I'm turned inwards and outwards
Searching for harsh comfort to replace egyptian cotton sheets.

Heights of delarious brightness are gone.
Where there was flesh theres only bone.
All our cushions turned to stone.

In Marcassie, the grass-fed cows are community owned.
Here, ideas are new or flowering.

When everything locked down, we dug a vegetable bed shaped like a coffin.
Those who saw it asked if your husband was buried underneath the kale and beetroot.

A red-haired woman reads a poem to the cherry tree.

In Marcassie, the Northern lights can sometimes be seen at this time of year.

In this room, there is always a fly trying to leave.
It never quite makes it.
It buzzes angily off and on against the glass pane.

Through the window July treetops are a green forgetting of other seasons. Winter is a dream, shrouded in leafy abundance. Spring is a thought of Summer before it came.

On an island in Denmark, you drink white wine.
You are mellow and tipsy, you say.
Hares play in front of you in a field,
They rarely think of leaving
or playing a better game.

When we feel incompatable
and I search my choices for the wrong one
I find none.

I have worries that buss around my head
like the wasps who were nesting in our roof.
There one day, gone the next.

We are masters of the rational.
When heart is gone,
lets see how you fit, how I fit
like peices in a jigsaw,
to make a better whole.

I meet Grace outside Brixton station
Her eyes roll upwards when she speaks of Jesus.
She is pushing the pamphlets of the Lord.
Sword raised and on a mission.
I think I know how this will go.

But does the cleaning up of SE9
The tidy line of once sprawling back street garages,
The neatening of shuttered-down shops
which exhale reggae and ***** and
The popping up of suprisingly good architecture,
Signal a shift in the redemption business?

Grace asks me if I've ever felt envy
I say Yes Grace regularly
She says God will forgive you.
I say I have already forgiven me.

We struggle to win the same ground for a while,
Battle over paths to peace
Go round and round
Up, over and underneath, what she thinks, what I think.
Until with sinking heart and flailing energy.
I move through wild eyed bag ladies
To another piece of street.

She got under my skin did Grace.
Reminds me how stone-carved my faith can be.
Creating certainty, even from mystery.
Perhaps we sin in the same church,
We probably shop in the same covered market.

When nothings wrong,
I dont write well.
I try and fail to think of a word besides 'filters' to describe the light coming through the wisteria leaves.
Soak up the light-filled air of the early morning,
And call this a day of few words.

There’s a new bird in the garden
A call I haven’t heard before.
I dream of beavers, incongruous and out of place.
Dam-building swimmers with no tails.

In a field nearby crows shout their business
I saw the planting there yesterday
A strong woman soring up the earth against the seedlings.

I spend too much on small-***** organic chickens.
Forage mushrooms righteously
Whilst wondering if they’ll make us sick.
I try to get it right
Over and over again

Scottish Winter taps on the window
Though September will gentle us.
Hopeful curtains stay open.
I feel the catch of damp in my throat.

I understand gulls a bit more this year.
They wake me with there shoulds and musts.
Unlike the geese which quicken overhead,
We share a rooftop,
Can look each other in the eye.

On Mothers day
Sunlight glints on frosty roof slates.
A Seagull launches from a chimney stack.
A line of pink foot geese spread along the top of a cloud
Part of the weather system and defying the wind.

This is the day my Father was born.
In a dream last night, I consult him.
Tripping through a canvas tent curtain
To where he sits with papers spread out on the floor.
He advises well. Keep it simple. Keep it small.

This is the day my husband left
Forever forewarned as a difficult date in my diary.
And in the dream, my Mother takes her own life,
As did her Father before her.

On this day life gives me
Gifts of affection and
Undying support
From Women past yet present.
And from the female present. Baton passed.
Who present candles and flowers
Give blessings and
Unceasing love
From a womb with unfathomable depths.
I thank you sweet ladies
For all your Mothering
Strong like iron and
Tender like a feather.

In an ivy clad fortress
Fallen render reveals the outline of a bird.
Drawn in pink plaster,
Master of mortar.
Trapped in the brick.
Safe though from this gale that stirs us up today.
It sits looking East
Towards the sea.

There the clatter and hum of sail bells
On Camberly Sands renders seagulls quiet
Devoid of a landing platform and
Lost for words.

Then crows
Cry collaboration.
A nation of black wings against
A clear sky.
Like solid drums unbeaten
By time and weather.

Feathers,
The Weather,
Kestrel on a breeze
Trees, falling leaves.

When life holds its breath.
Breath.
Feet on sand,
Your hand on my side.
The tide music of waves.

Grasses.
Sunglasses.
Ring-neck doves.
All my love.

I saw you cross the road
We call you badger
You are low to the snow that lays on the tarmac

A joy knocks at the soles of my feet
It bejewels me,
Alives me
Gifts and
Brings me present.

By the Findhorn river where no man is standing,
Theres a white post of a station, called Heron.

We watch the jumpy water, iced up at the edges
Its flow caught in cold.

Heron in stealth and I in peace for a while.
On different banks, and I am a hunter of sorts.

We see a mammal movement,
An otter. Athlete and champion.
We surrender to its wild catching.
It's thrash ends our hunt.

Heron flies to my bank.
We shift to audience,
These small moments
A wordless solution to trouble.

I go to your garden to plant trees
A nice day sings itself into being.
As we welly-up
A woodpecker arrives
On wavey flight.
Gets busy on a rowan branch
Its smart black, red and white message
Stops us
Like a catchy short story.
Holds us softly
In a glue of wonder.

Driving home through a mist,
A post by the side of the road
Holds a Sparrowhawk.
Like an everyday totem pole.
Like a carving of an ancient
king.
On a simple wooden throne.
Like wood bird alchemy.
Throwing us a spell.
Like an offering of mystery
In our cocktail
Of certainty.

Your brown feathers are turning white
Waiting for adult wings to carry you off.
The water is clear
As you graze on the river bed
So close you hold us silent.
We listen to your shape
See how you sound
Half fish
Half bird now.
You bend us
Like light refracted
On this ancient modern stream.
Like warp.
We dream into your name
And swan dive with you
In this time.

We are out
For a walk.
We cross an old stoney bridge.
Low lying flat stones
Hold its history.
We look at the water,
Talking of fishing rights and such.
There, resting,
Over a foot long,
A Trout!
Brown as the bridge
That saves it from the current.
Hanging in the water.
Resting in liquid silver,
You lullaby us
Our fast streams mastered for now.

I see you on a wall
By a mill pond.
Little Philemon
An unearthly turquoise
Stills us.
Stops and
Holds us.

The maths of the moment,
A trickster tune,
Beguiles us.
A quadrangled pool
You dive 4 times
We are 4.

We leave.
You too, Fisher king.
Some unwordly
Concept passes between us
A square noted scribble.
A mystery message .

It was 5 a.m.
Owls hooted,
Holding Parliament,
Honey hooting the night Goodbye.

You talk of pain.
I have none.
She hoots, holding my tongue gently,
Lest I tred too loudly on your hurting.

I heed her
Bend to a greater *** of gold
Than we both can muster.
Hurt passes.

The trees take in the owls.
Breaths out crows.
The sky like blue cotton
Lays its fabric on the day.

Pines reach like a scale of 1 to 10
Pyramids of God and science.
I ride a train tracking a coastline of
Secrets and seals.
Where golden ferns whisper paths
Through the land.

Here in your house
The sound of my blood in veins
Bounces off the walls at night
We are so deep in a silent vale.

I am sergeant to your boredom and you to mine
We occupy and inhabit.
Kept like the spices in your cupboard
A little too long past their best.

My writing becomes possessive.
I sit down too hard
On an easy chair
Slip on the shiny leather surface
Smooth from overuse.
Down to ground.

I have nothing to uphold
No sculptured walls
Protect my castle.
No dowager queen dwells safely inside.
Lying in change space
Open to reshaping

my hair is in curlers
it feels like a wife life.

your mood lifts as the sun comes out.
i lose you to a change in the weather.

like isobars we pressure and part
then part and pressure.

a dream of a jaded beach marriage
fades and we bury footprints in the sand.

left there on this island
for the next generation of sunseekers

There was nothing humble about the storm last night
Towels like slaughtered goats on the balcony
A sea with the texture of a badly joined metal pipes
All talk of our suffocation
Quietened
Of too much or too little breath
Now we see a bigger in and out if it all.

Is the name of the island the same
As the Greek word for wind?
Today it has taken us over
We hunch like vultures against it
Stiff necked and collar up
Or give in
Like the sea creatures thrown up on a cluttered shore.

In the hills
On a road
Where there are no potholes
Just portels
Where God has power and purchase
We see a bird
Which we call Eleanors falcon
You back up the car so I can get a better look
Though it's not your thing to spot and name
I have a priceless softening to you friend
With your small gestures of kindness
And graceful interventions
My heart steps toward you
Like a monk on a gratitude path.

I watch Greek men
With hunting dogs
Arrive on the island.
We say
What's the prey?
Then later
Over black sweet coffee
We pray for sun.

3 collie dogs
Follow a man who
Rides *******
Up valley side.
Like foot soldiers
Swordlike
They look for orders

We navigate the mist of
Dreaming
We dont know any more
We can only shepherd
New order in hope
While we Hunt for love
With guide dogs now.

It's a place and a moment
It's where I saw an otter
After I had swum in the shallows
Of the Findhorn river
Knees knocking the rocks.

I take you there
Tell you of the moment.
We quieten and wander apart.
You would have swum in deeper waters
You say.
We come together, drinking tea.
You talk of The river
Being sured up and undercut.

On the grass bank
2 puffball mushrooms
White against green.
One each.
With reverence you cut them .
And pull jet black coiled worms
From holes in their flanks.
They are like brains I say.

We walk through a meadow.
You throw your bike to the ground
As if your feet already know where to go.
I struggle with my bike for a while
And then I copy you.
We stand and look at a wire fence
Some grasses
We wonder if they really look like that.
Or is it consensual reality.
So we can feel sured up.
Not undercut.

In your garden, later
You stand like a love
Salute.
Meeting my eyes.
I know what it is to be seen.
I trust you beyond measure.

Soft eyed seals see us
As we swirl with binoculars
On a circular platform
Looking out to sea.
The Moray Firth chops
Hiding the fins of
Basking sharks from view.
The water is full of potential fins
That trick and taunt us.

When we are stopped for a while,
Potential occurs,
A shift that we both feel.
It is undivorced from our conversation
From the rhythm of the sea
From the times the tide
gravels up higher
Closer to us.
A bird dives, a gillimot you say.

We talk of movement
Then we move, slowly.
Birds fly past.
We may have called them
They may have called us.
We have to 'not know'
In this time of naming birds.

A grimy light.
Coal-laden air
A live bird
Brought into darkness.
Unknowng
if the ground will
collapse,
Trusting
Others who's eyes shine
Black and blindly.

To take up some
piece of no value to man.
Ashamed to reach for it
even though it was
Always yours to hold.

On the face of it
When lungs cough up dead
canaries and all we see
Are metal towers.
A glint of dawn
Light catches on the cut
surface of what at you have.
Colours it
Purple, olive and rust
in the morning sun.

And in this shining,
When you
opened your hand and
showed your fellow
miners
and risked
Shaming over and over again.
Someone says
Is beautiful.

The chances
of being born are slim.
Many are lost.
The chances of someone
seeing what
You hold
Are less.
But we
mine for gold
Like troopers.
Until the ground is uncut with trenches.
And we stand on the battlefield
Arm in arm.
Shadows long
In the evening sun.

I scan my phone for love
And to see if I can become more
loveable.
While the washing machine spins into a panic.

I miss and yearn
Long and miss.

Then I change things.
Like I always knew I would.

I take control of my death
Life becomes a painting
Full of beautiful mistakes
Held lovingly against the perfection of nature
Like the sea colour of leek leaves against new soil.
Like a crow playing hawk against a blue sky.

Soldiers and Fairies and clouds like smoke signals
I run for a bunker today.
To a breath that is soft and has no opinions.
To the owls of Cluny Woods who meet the crows at Dawn and pass the batton.
Enraptured by the smell of dog and mushrooms,
I walk with the unborn holding my belly together.

A storm comes on strong
A band of tropical rain.
Like men in a mosque
We all bow to it
Palm leaves, birdsong and I.

We let it loosen us
Make us bright and sacred.
Humble and full
I am gently soaked in beauty
More tender to the World at storms passing.

We talk of why
In this place
We seem not ******
These peoples also, we say.
Is it what surrounds us?
The intimate is-ness?
Vine on tree trunk
Rain on earth.
Tree held by rock
Bird held by flock
Are we brought to a better truth here
Where there is no need to
Rush for confirmation and release.
Does the sea water please us
Enough.

My 60 year old beach body
Renders me invisible
To men on deckchairs.
I flaunt fat
Smile without agenda
Settling in the comfort of years.

A dragon fly
Over a swimming pool
Zig zags with purpose
Like being in at the deep end
Taking a hard decision.

He is red
Like the writing on the wall
Saying 1.6 meters
As I swim my 16th lap.
Like the 4x4 Taxis here

He is trapped
in the realm of tourists
This pool holds no reeds on which to land
No link between air and water depths
For the hatching of generations

He repeats
the habits of his ancestors
Guards this sterile domain
With militant commitment
His choices narrow with each day.

He shows me
Gives me a lesson
Makes me question rote and way
I let go a little, grateful for choice
And human options.

One day he is gone
Then a second day.
I wonder about that
Did he finally see, on my on lap 24,
the futility of defending small horizons.

You buy lemons and
I eat mango salad
We sponge up the radiance of this place.
The culture is rich and bright
So throws deep shadows.
I keep amulets of gratitude close and
Feel the full futility of trying to impress
When wisdom is a thing that changes daily
According to the season,
And the available fruit

Dawn run with an American friend,
We kick path.
We hear the crack
Of pebbles on ice puddles
In the early morning,
As in a cavern
somewhere untouched
Where no one but the rocks hear.

Here on the path
We dwell in chit chat
The tic of difficult conversation
Fades with the rythm of our feet.
We meet a woman
Mother of twins
In an instant we are a joyful crowd
Proud to be the firsts to meet the day.

Mists melt with sun up
Women and dogs claim the lane
Cold leaves the world for us
Safe now like a house
where we slept like stones,
And where shallow is the new deep.

I rest with you sweet man,
We count past lovers under the sheets
Its Early, 5.30
We have still, non ******* ***
We turn together as in a tunnel.
You have had more women
Than I have men
It irks me like
My gambling Grandfather
Who robbed me of paper mills,
And wealth

Strangers to me
You friends arrive
I am weary of my childish awkwardness with people unfamiliar
Of my pain at silence and the repercussive shame.
The question
What do you do?
In the successful circle
I want a paper mill
Or to a least have had more lovers than you.

Rest,
The blessed undress
Of strain and stress
Rains down on us.

Gentle,
Right on time and elemental
Whole and simple
A soul temple.

Chickens queue at my cousins gate,
Their embroidery glitters,
Like an exhibition
Laid out
At the V&A.
We eat their eggs,
Or not, you say,
They we're bought nearby, yesterday.

A blackbirds sings out of season,
We choke slightly on its song.
Grief, like a family name, follows,
Wrongness,
Like a boy hit by a drunken Father
When he was down.

We have mills in common,
Shod hooves on a peat path.
A Hardy blacksmith's daughter,
Iron hissing in its water bath,
Passion,
Spawns a tree,
Like us,
Made of paper.

Rest,
The blessed undress.
I let your American way
Sway me,
Light like a
Instagram follower,
Who speaks of beauty
Despite anonimity.
It's lovely isn't it?
The blue is unclouded,
Sea mist shrouded,
Today,
The planets called Holiday.

How can I not walk the twisty path,
Sit in chairs away from everyone
To read about poetry
and drink hot chocolate
When your beauty is at every corner?

How can I not grow and flourish,
Like the long shadows of the early morning
on the path in front of us,
When I am nourished at all turns?

How can I not feel lightness,
Like the soft white flour sieved by a cook
Into a competition winning cake,
Baked to perfection,
When you stir my worries into treasures.

How can I not love you,
When you brave
Unmanlyness
To show me your soul.

This Christmas
I had no-one but the dead
To apologise to.

No cards sent
Could match, in feeling
My sorrow at your passing.

No wrapping paper crunch
Could drown the sense of failing you,
When trust had grown
Up such a precarious path.

Full blown
Shapeshifters
Of streets and shops.
They swirl dervishlike.

When they stop,
I mistake them for dead crows,
Suffering rats,
Run over cats.

They meditate
In sheltered spaces
And parking places.
Near extinction
Almost fiction

Elevated by balloon ambitions
And skyward missions
Plastic projections of our
Longing for solutions
To pollution
(it's all their fault! ).

When I walk a beach with you
The sea comes to know us,
Holds us,
Sees that we are lovers,
And tells all Oceans.

When I walk a road with you
Love poems, gentle in the trees,
By a breeze
Carry to the clouds
And tell the Sky.

She's found him.
She is home.
All is well.