'Take your dream as far as you can'- tear up the 
roots of the dead flowers, grab the branches 
above you and swing into the unreal vision of 
reality, breathe the air of spaces unknown, 
carrying with you the experiences of pressing 
thoughts, the sudden surprises of youth, the 
views that, with a flash of excitement, open up 
great wide vistas, and magnetise your senses 
to fly into their psychedelic embrace. 

Float along on the streams of life, like the 
autumn leaf, after dipping and diving, 
as it finds the calm of a lake's edge 
and oscillates in the quiet breezes, 
gathering the last rays of the setting sun, 
before it sinks, to become new life. 

Dance to the sound of the song bird, 
the drip of the rain, the swirl of the clouds 
and the dramatic movement in an opera when 
all voices join, and sound their messages 
out to the universe of stars and planets. 

Feel with your hands the shape of the future, 
smoothed and polished, slippery and textured, 
bumpy and sharp; become a new form of 
yourself, create something out of your own 
arsenal, using your whole being.
 
Touch the page with the tip of the brush, the 
full wash across the hand made paper, the 
colours of all nature, the scarlets, the azures, 
the emeralds, the golds, in hallucinations that 
are real, mysteries that metaphorically express 
the quick of your spirit, and are seen to be art.

Margaret Ann Waddicor 29th October 2012.

Written the same day... On my way home the dry Autumn leaves dancing cart-wheels past me, and did tap dancing on the tarmac, it was quite loudly they rattled past and flew away ahead of me as if like a flock of chattering children, rust brown and ochre colours doing their kind of wind dance, how wonderful all these percussion-like noises nature makes; just like the ice on the lake where the children were throwing blocks onto the hard surface, the sounding - box of the lake itself making that eerie kind of clang of sound that at first I thought might be some strange bird. I took up a video on my iPhone, but **** it, having fingers that were near frozen they didn't manage to push the tiny lever over from pure photography, so, to my great disappointment I when I got back there were only photos of it. Such is life!!!

I looked out,
Christmas decorations were already hung up in the sky,
even the frosting floated about
with the lights of the town dwarfed below,
such a glow, each ***** of a star,
the hills, hulks of stone, seemed warmed,
ready for celebrations,
annual explanations of our psyche and its exaggerations,
where the simple tale, just like the one stella, bright,
enacts its cycles in the dark of night.

Margaret Ann Waddicor 27th November 2014.

He sat there sad, 
his tree alight with silver ***** and trinkets, 
alone this holy night, while others gather round, 
resound with songs of joy, 
here silence reigns, his frosty panes describe the star.

Now passed away, his friends, his family and foes, 
he meditates, their atmosphere, 
so dear, so fresh, 
so faded in his memory of other times gone by, 
they leap, a flame, a candle in his mind, 
and opened a bright drawer, 
where lay the rosary his mother wore, 
and taking up this precious chain, 
of litanies and prayers. 

He heard his mother's voice again,
he saw her face, 
felt solace in his fears; 
now all the years of health and youth have fled, 
now bled the veins of beating hearts 
that gave him sustenance and sentiments so pure, 
devout; their ether filled the air, 
it was as if he'd taken flight and all his family was there.

A knock awoke him from his dream, 
his magic reverie, 
he was just sitting quite alone, 
who could that stranger be, 
a little boy, just like himself, stood smiling on the mat, 
he sang his favourite Christmas carol, 
his little box for charity held high for all to see, 
but when the penny dropped inside, there was no boy at all.                

Margaret Ann Waddicor 2010.

My heart is a boiling cauldron stewing with
A pinch of kindness,
A sprinkling of hope,
A dash of hate,
A gram of generosity,
A dram of charity,
A tablespoon of despair,
A measure of temperance,
A teaspoon of patience,
And a shake of faith.
Now, simmering on the element,
I can ladle out bowls of love.

Following the waving trees, 
the same direction as the breeze, 
as if a thermal element 
was wafted with my gait,

as blown along beside the river, 
downstream with it's flow, 
I felt a kind of impetus, 
impulsive like a joy, 
that grabs the psyche, 
swings the spirit in high gear,

a thrill of moving onward 
through the day and year, 
as if time were anonymous 
and I a mere convolvulous, 
that happened to be flowering today.

Ann Waddicor August 2013.