September morning and the blush pink of a child's eyelid
layers
With soft Wedgewood blue
And a silvery white.
Feathery treetops shiver in the light breeze
And there is a delicious chill in the air.
Contrails break apart in slow motion
Resting on the daybreak's skyline.

A blackbird hops across the dewy grass
To take his morning slice of stale bread.
Rose petals crimped and heavy wait
Patiently to be dried in the pastel sun.

There is no sadness as the summer slips by;
Just memories of freshly mown grass
On parish fields, of light, of warmth,
Of sea and country walks
Sweetening, like apples
In a sand box.

A mothers embrace teaches you so many things,
security and protection,
warmth and comfort,
softness and sobriety,
yet among these feelings
comes a sense of strength,
a timeless intuition,
her strength is inherent,
it comes forth from the innermost secrets of nature,
it always felt as though it was limitless,
even now that the hair is grey,
and her beauty long since diminished with age,
I still feel it all.

There are hearts of gilt,
And there are hearts of sin
There are hearts that lose,
And there are hearts that win.
There are hearts of stone.

But if my heart was anything,
It'd be a cactus.

Prickly and unwelcoming with tight alien-green skin,
That never fails to swell to accommodate whatever grew inside unseen.
With love it'd bulge,
And it'd shrink in the absence of love.

(But with the right care it could bloom the most spectacular flowers.)

There are strong hearts,
But even strong hearts give in.
My heart is a cactus heart,
My heart could keep it all in.

Sitting facing the
Lounge window
At Bingo
It had been a hot September day
Then it started to rain
Pouring down
And the sky became a pale pink
And the leaves a bronze brown
A beautiful moment
Captured by my mind in time

These days it seems
I remember my early childhood
Better than the contents of my last meal
Dementia creeps.......

Right now,
I'm remembering one early evening
With four of us small boys
Sitting on a wall
Discussing the realities of the world
As we knew it

The moon was pale but visible
And a subject for discussion
As serious as old men playing chess
We wondered how far away it could be
One lad said it was farther than London
But we knew that was obviously wrong
After all
We could see the moon
No-one had seen London

                                       By Phil Roberts