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 Aug 2014 jo spencer
R.S. Thomas
We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.
I am in a dark silent place without scent or colour

I am beyond reach and fear

Perhaps beyond hope and love

It is a difficult place to reach and there are no rewards ... no guarantee 's

Will you reach for me? Will you extend your hand when there is no hope of gratitude or acknowledgment?

Will you shrug and say "Ive done my best" and wander on?

Will you pass me by because I am unable to call to you?

Once you called me friend , Sister, teacher ... Do these have meaning to you still?

I find myself here in a darkling place it is a quiet place it is a safe but deadly place ..will you leave me here in this soft warm trap?

Or ... will you chance my wrath and pull me kicking and screaming into the light and the world of the living and life

will you endure my screams and futile battles?

And at last ...bring me home to you?

Shall I wait for you ..or sleep My Friend, Sister.Teacher, Shall I wait?
 Jun 2014 jo spencer
Judypatooote
As I walk along the water front,
in my own little world...

I would sometimes count the footprints,
and then I'd turn with a quick swirl...

Picking up colored glass,
for mom to put in her plants...

and somtimes I'd find a perfect shell,
that wasn't covered with ants...

Dead fish, here and there,
they washed up on the shore...

You'd think you saw the last one,
and ooops there would be many more...

On my way back, in the field I would go,
to pick mom some flowers, for that's where they grow...

Summers at the cottege, when I was very young,
I had to use my imagination for making my fun...
As an only child, I would create castles in the sand, make mud pies with the clay, and that would help pass a very long day...as I would be in my own little world.
clusters of heaped leaves
lodge against sunsets orange hue
turning towards autumns fanfare
I sense this  time of cleansing
a shroud without a name descends
taking only twigs to ignite an epiphany
Autumn you are a cove with an argent must
whose manifest dusts rotted boughs
an ecosystem to reciprocate
considered hope
 May 2014 jo spencer
Clem N Tine
I swim in verdancy on my back; let the greyness wash my face
Atop the top of the toppest valley

Only half of me is here; I am only half here
Inhale, Exhale

I Take in the masterpiece above me; branches intertwining
People could learn from the trees

On my left I have Nothing; Nothing sticks around
Until he grew restless and took the path on my right

As my lids fall in tire; the Earth embraces me in sweet arms
Lying in my bed of worries

The wind so tender, so dear, kneels down to meet my cheek
And the leaves mutter in joy

When Nothing goes right; I find solace in trees
Let myself drown in the shade of natural love.

And patiently I wait for the sun to wake up
to illuminate the masterpiece
The sun rises every morning.
We held the occasional truth in the palm of ours hands
right or wrong we trembled the stars
only to find the intergalactic  flotsam predisposed
but in keeping with our fears
we crossed  the  Rubicon
to  unforce the  key
down at circes place
where we never waiver
 Apr 2014 jo spencer
Nigel Morgan
January Colours

In the winter garden
of the Villa del Parma
by the artist’s studio
green
grass turns vert de terre
and the stone walls
a wet mouse’s back
grounding neutral – but calm,
soothing like calamine
in today’s mizzle,
a permanent dimpsey,
fine drenching drizzle,
almost invisible, yet
saturating skylights
with evidence of rain.

February Colours

In the kitchen’s borrowed light,
dear Grace makes bread  
on the mahogany table,
her palma gray dress
bringing the outside in.

Whilst next door, inside
Vanessa’s garden room
the French windows
firmly shut out this
season’s bitter weather.

There, in the stone jar
beside her desk,
branches of heather;
Erica for winter’s retreat,
Calluna for spring’s expectation.

Tea awaits in Duncan’s domain.
Set amongst the books and murals,
Spode’s best bone china  
turning a porcelain pink
as the hearth’s fire burns bright..

Today
in this house
a very Bloomsbury tone,
a truly Charleston Gray.

March Colours

Not quite daffodil
Not yet spring
Lancaster Yellow
Was Nancy’s shade

For the drawing room
Walls of Kelmarsh Hall
And its high plastered ceiling
Of blue ground blue.

Playing cat’s paw
Like the monkey she was
Two drab husbands paid
For the gardens she made,
For haphazard luxuriance.

Society decorator, partner
In paper and paint,
She’d walk the grounds
Of her Palladian gem
Conjuring for the catalogue
Such ingenious labels:

Brassica and Cooking Apple
Green
to be seen
In gardens and orchards
Grown to be greens.

April Colours

It would be churlish
to expect, a folly to believe,
that green leaves would  
cover the trees just yet.

But blossom will:
clusters of flowers,
Damson white,
Cherry red,
Middleton pink,

And at the fields’ edge
Primroses dayroom yellow,
a convalescent colour
healing the hedgerows
of winter’s afflictions.

Clouds storm Salisbury Plain,
and as a skimming stone
on water, touch, rise, touch
and fall behind horizon’s rim.
Where it goes - no one knows.

Far (far) from the Madding Crowd
Hardy’s concordant cove at Lulworth
blue
by the cold sea, clear in the crystal air,
still taut with spring.

May Colours

A spring day
In Suffield Green,
The sky is cook’s blue,
The clouds pointing white.

In this village near Norwich
Lives Marcel Manouna
Thawbed and babouched
With lemurs and llamas,
Leopards and duck,
And more . . .

This small menagerie
Is Marcel’s only luxury
A curious curiosity
In a Norfolk village
Near to Norwich.

So, on this
Blossoming
Spring day
Marcel’s blue grey
Parrot James
Perched on a gate
Squawks the refrain

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med
And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!

June

Thrownware
earth red
thrown off the ****
the Japanese way.
Inside hand does the work,
keeps it alive.
Outside hand holds the clay
and critically tweaks.
Touch, press, hold, release
Scooting, patting, spin!
Centering: the act
precedes all others
on the potter’s wheel.
Centering: the day
the sun climbs highest
in our hemisphere.
And then affix the glaze
in colours of summer:
Stone blue
Cabbage white
Print-room yellow
Saxon green
Rectory red

And fire!

July Colours

I see you
by the dix blue
asters in the Grey Walk
via the Pear Pond,
a circuit of surprises
past the Witches House,
the Radicchio View,
to the beautifully manicured
Orangery lawns, then the
East and West Rills of
Gertrude’s Great Plat.

And under that pea green hat
you wear, my mistress dear,
though your face may be April
there’s July in your eyes of such grace.

I see you wander at will
down the cinder rose path
‘neath the drawing-room blue sky.

August Colours

Out on the wet sand
Mark and Sarah
take their morning stroll.
He, barefoot in a blazer,
She, linen-light in a wide-brimmed straw,
Together they survey
their (very) elegant home,
Colonial British,
Classic traditional,
a retreat in Olive County, Florida:
white sandy beaches,
playful porpoises,
gentle manatees.

It’s an everfine August day
humid and hot
in the hurricane season.
But later they’ll picnic on
Brinjal Baigan Bharta
in the Chinese Blue sea-view
dining room fashioned
by doyen designer
Leta Austin Foster
who ‘loves to bring the ocean inside.
I adore the colour blue,’ she says,
‘though gray is my favourite.’

September

A perfect day
at the Castle of Mey
beckons.
Watching the rising sun
disperse the morning mists,
the Duchess sits
by the window
in the Breakfast Room.
Green
leaves have yet to give way
to autumn colours but the air
is seasonably cool, September fresh.

William is fishing the Warriner’s Pool,
curling casts with a Highlander fly.
She waits; dressed in Power Blue
silk, Citron tights,
a shawl of India Yellow
draped over her shoulders.
But there he is, crossing the home beat,
Lucy, her pale hound at his heels,
a dead salmon in his bag.

October Colours

At Berrington
blue
, clear skies,
chill mornings
before the first frosts
and the apples ripe for picking
(place a cupped hand under the fruit
and gently ‘clunch’).

Henry Holland’s hall -
just ‘the perfect place to live’.
From the Picture Gallery
red
olent in portraits
and naval scenes,
the view looks beyond
Capability’s parkland
to Brecon’s Beacons.

At the fourteen-acre pool
trees, cane and reed
mirror in the still water
where Common Kingfishers,
blue green with fowler pink feet
vie with Grey Herons,
funereal grey,
to ruffle this autumn scene.

November Colours

In pigeon light
this damp day
settles itself
into lamp-room grey.

The trees intone
farewell farewell:
An autumnal valedictory
to reluctant leaves.

Yet a few remain
bold coloured

Porphry Pink
Fox Red
Fowler
Sudbury Yellow


hanging by a thread
they turn in the stillest air.

Then fall
Then fall

December Colours*

Green smoke* from damp leaves
float from gardens’ bonfires,
rise in the silver Blackened sky.

Close by the tall railings,
fast to lichened walls
we walk cold winter streets

to the warm world of home, where
shadows thrown by the parlour fire
dance on the wainscot, flicker from the hearth.

Hanging from our welcome door
see how incarnadine the berries are
on this hollyed wreath of polished leaves.
warm air crept over ice last night as we slept
arriving to offend morning with doubt
comforting, I think, the frigid sear that reminded once of life

because this restless fog obscures thought
and has made the world smaller, duller
I've begun to wonder, now, where the living hide

there’s a familiar ghost, that man half blind,
wandering creaking boards inside
hoping to find joys in his shoe box of blurred photographs,

researching meaning among reams
of precious handwritten notes and shopping lists,
their chapters stacked in magazine racks and bookshelves

opening the hapless, broken-winged jewelry box
remembered crisply wrapped in ribbons, love and flowered paper once,
to finger its claspless necklaces, orphaned earrings and half smiles


her old clothes are freshly laundered,
the favored sweater with holes, neatly folded
stored in the bottom drawer to savor forever


will we all live, neat, finally quiet
in boxes someday, just like this?
he chose to robe her in that special dress, but kept its matching scarf...



I glimpsed him in her mirror as he paced
and wait for mist to pass
 Mar 2014 jo spencer
lina S
Nothing stays forever and I'm sick and tired of putting so much effort in trying to weaver our emotions into connections so I can wear our relationship happily knowing that it will get old and it will get cut and it will smell and I won't want to wear it any more.

and now whenever I'm high all I can see is the fall

I can see you becomig busy with others while I find myself some others because I'll be the one you talk to others about saying " ahh l don't feel like doing the effort to hang with her " that is if you still remember me by then .

nothing stays forever

I expect that you won't like me , like I won't like you forever. I expect life to take you away and for me and you to stray but not together.

Because

nothing stays forever

It's so sad that nothing stays forever , but I can't change it , you can't change it , we must understand the reason behind it.
But at the moment I'm just swamped in a pool of feelings behind it.
Reason and logic are upstairs in the lobby drinking some tea it's hot and I like swimming so I don't see myself going to meet them anytime soon I might just drown in this pool.
And never meet my reason and logic .

funny thing is you walk around my pool but you're never in it .
And I'm weaving in a pool and the strings are getting wet and its soo hard and your not helping your just there tanning chilling and the world does not revolve around us.

Agh these thoughts are killing ...

But I'm going down this road whether it's fast or slow we are ganna go .
And I don't even know anymore
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