The artist and the model.

When I draw you I create both of us anew,
Your form fills my eyes and I am moved,
I take from you myself, and all my idiosyncrasies.
You are my voice calling its name,
I try to find what is beauty,
Through line and mark and scale,
I give this back to you as Love,
A drawing on a page.

Love Mary

She sits as only little girls do
Playing with the ends of her hair
Watching the boats come in
And go out
On the choppy Solent waves.
The shingle is wet glass
And clouds form playful shapes.
Looking behind she sees her father
Smiling as he carries dripping lollies
To console a sunless afternoon.

He reaches the promenade
With its concrete *****
Balancing feet without sight
He slowly walks towards her.
She senses his vulnerability
Love pours out
Soaking her dress with spray
As she moves
To help him
Those last few steps.

Love Mary

I measure out my days
Not in the expected ways
With outings to friends
People popping in
Sunday lunch
A telephone call
But by how far
I can fly
Without any wings.

And in doing so
Turn it into
Something
Beautiful.

Love Mary x

I remember the death of my grandfather
My head filled out the spoken words
There a man stretched out, sublime,
In an upstairs bedroom room,
Unable to breath, doctor called,
His family standing at his side.
This was 1957, I was five.
My father had gone to be with
A father he both loved
And feared, felt tenderness for
and pitied.

I stayed with my mother,
Saying "just because
I do not cry Mummy does not mean
I am not sad."
With my small child's hands
I made her a cup of tea.

Grandfather was a rough, tough
Man,
Always impeccably dressed
In white shirt and a tie,
He threw his dinners at the wall
Collected greyhounds
And raced them at the White City
They all died, all six.
Gave me a shiny half- crown piece
At every visit and a razored kiss,
He was a lamplighter, fifty- six.

I loved him
In a child's simple way
Knew his heart loved
But life was tough.
My father spoke kindly of him
"Poor burger" my grandfather said
When my father took on a mortgage.
Poor ******.

Love Mary x

I am spread out in my green dress
With the buttons updone
And listening to the music
That you played for my song
It is evening and wherever I be
You're all with me
My dear poets
I'm glad I found thee.

Love to my poet friends Mary ***

Stephen, love surrounded you
Tragedy befell you
Corruption embalmed you
We all failed you
You made us better people
You made us more aware
That for racial hatred
There is no room to bare.

Nothing can replace you
A boy of seventeen
Helplessly slaughtered
In a London scene
Remembrance of you
Is the best we can give
Beautiful boy
Just wish you'd lived.

Love Mary x

I love the bauble tree fern
Out towards the sun you go
In decorations of crimson
Your seedlings circle rows.

Love Mary x

Inside where lining attaches to sleeve
The coming away had loosened there
Leaving the fragility of many winters’
And the oversewing of a tender hand.

Love Mary

Falling plums.

I would sit for hours
Squelching the stones to
A deepness.
The birds had taken their chew
Yellow beaked blood stained .
It was difficult finding a clearing
To be comfortable.

I disliked the plum falling season.
The paving stones dirtied.
No one collected them
Always too few
Yet I remember the word Damson
In a labelled jam jar
Stiff and sticky on a larder shelf.

Love Mary Kearns

Separated from the outside,
The world of masculinity
And paid labour
The mother and child
Seemingly secure.
Only the sky, glimpsed between
Overhanging branches, lights
This secluded kitchen plot
Where vegetables are washed
And the broom sweeps clean
The tiled yard.
The space between diagonals
Creates triangles of intimacy
Here the little Dutch girl
Looks tenderly upwards
At the female figure
In white apron and cap.
The foreground is reversed
For this activity is a hidden
Place
Where the warmth of yellow
Echoes the harmony
Of a domestic idyll.


Love Mary ***

We watched the black and white movies
The old ones from the thirties
With Gregory Peck.
His favourite was
‘South Pacific’
And he would whistle
‘Some Enchanted Evening’
As he came home up the lanes.

Love Mary

When I look into your eyes
That gaze back with intent
Symmetrically aligned
Parallel to the ears behind
I wonder who you will be
Pondering the world you see.

And under those Speedwell globes
Is a dainty buttoned nose
You can twitch and wriggle
To make any audience giggle
Dropping vertically down
Is a mouth that rarely frowns.

And on the top of all of this
Is the fairest of the gifts
Lightly feathered cap of gold
Onto your shoulder folds
But it is your big blue eyes
That is where your beauty lies.


To Evelyn at two Love Grandma Mary **

So it is with our fortunes on our backs
Tapering the edges of life we continue
Never really understanding the naked
Flame as it enfolds, wraps us forever a
Moment to standstraight and say come.

Love Mary

All along the avenue of trees
Which leads down to the canal
Are spaces which cast shadows
Tall lengthening towers.

Down the avenue of trees
Many have walked
Some are missing, others gone
The gaps are like fallen trees.

The park, a monument to change
To the universal truth of sorrows
The welcoming joy of Spring
And every new footstep that begins.


Love Mary ***

Oh little garden new this year
The beginning just begun
The seeds and saplings planted
To start a journey long.

This gift of nature to another
Was given out of love
So they may know what I have
And also know my love.

Love Mary x

Bear came to do my garden today
It had got into rather a mess,
Sticky Jenny and dandelions,
Rotten roots and garlic shoots
Got poor Bear betwixed;
Hot and sweating, really fretting
Bear began to cry,
Why was it that I thought gardening
From painting let me hide.
But off he went along the fence
Pulling out the weeds
Found some bulbs that did not smell
Dug  them up, as fast, as well
Now they're  back in a different spot
Three short stems in an empty plot;
Made me laugh just to see
How silly that Woolly Bear can be.


Love Mary
Thank you to Ian my Gardener

To  Daffodills

Faire Daffodills, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early - rising Sun
Has not attain'd his noone.
            Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
                   Has run
But to the even- song:
And, having pray'd together,we
Will goe with you along.

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet Decay,
As you or any thing.
       We die
As your hours do and drie
                       Away,
Like to the Summers raine,
Or as the pearles of morning dew
Ne'r to be found againe.

By Robert Herrick (1591-1674

Love from Mary XXXX

You play so lightly pretty maid
If I touch you, what would you say
So near, I hear a heart beat
Feel your breathing on my face.

And the sunlight caresses your sleeve
At this beauty I barely breathe
My fingers creep towards yours
And you ignore me and do play.

I can feel you lift those fingers
Oh so slowly on the keys
And I want you there to need me
But you stare straight in front.

Now I am earnest in this warm light
And your black pinafore falls as a dove
Oh so soft is the velvet covering
Curled around you gentle love.


Yet do you not hear me in this stillness
Where the words go unsaid
Is the music your only love dear?
For my passion is outsaid.

On the blue chair I will sit you
Press open your knees
Find my fingers in your underskirts
Rub you tenderly with my sheath.

Yet you keep playing in the sunlight
While I hold deep my breath
And my panting is becoming audible
As I look at your *******.

Yet I fear this is useless as my ardour is strong
But for you pretty lady my love appears wrong.



Love Maryxx

My heart grows in gardens
Spread out the land
Roses magnificient
Some climbing some stand
The roses are David Austin
Cupped shaped layers of flounce
To touch they do drop
Becoming sailing craft.
The gardens are my home
Petals covering the ground
And my heart lives there
Foverver grateful for a hand.


Love Mary  xxxx

It was Sunday, Mum away
The weekend holiday
Choosing ‘a no added sugar dress’
With its diagonal stripes
Break dancing like joins
A symbol of 60s voguing.

Evelyn down loads a drawing programme
On her IPad and
begins to inhabit
The kitchen table
With colourful trolls
Florence her sister is two and a half
With a head full of curls and twirly skirt
Herself two and half years older.

Love Grandma Mary

Dears never feel the pain of your loss
But hold hands together and in that
Moment know you have a part of me
That is with your heart always there.

Love Mumxxxx

Never found the purple
Through all the years of searching
So what was started remained incomplete
Stashed away in hope that maybe
Recovery would mend broken hearts
Replenish the solitary dream
And bring warmth to those
Forgotten and bereft.

Love Mary

There were days of continual wetness
When the beach huts
Suffocated
Limiting pleasure
To mealtimes
And quick dashes to the
Sea.
Ice creams stayed frozen
In their wrappers
And craneflies buzzed
In the corner
Making the humidity
Irritated
After a fortnight
We were glad to go home
Next year was a long way off.

Love Mary x

A Birch tree up in younder wood becalmed
And no injustice to this bleach’ed land
For dusk doth bite the lonely head of man
Who in despair bleeds out his endless hours.


Love Mary x

A ball of prickles sheared close
A sculpture in a park
Yellow segmented flower
With opening bud
A harsh world as
Hard as any prickle
A phone call to a newspaper
Editor
A cry for help
Lies in the light
Organisation
No trust
May this world
Treat you all
Much better
Stars in the night.

Love Mary ***

I loved you from the start
On day one
Just felt comfortable
And we could talk
You told me about
The world of everything
Mother liked you
You shared knowledge
Of scientific things
She always liked you
My father less impressed
As sport not on your
Agenda, especially football.

You read to me books
With a voice filled with
Intonation
Curled together in a chair
You had a beard
And long hair
Dark soft eyes
Against my pale blue
I never stopped loving you
Never
It is now forty- eight years.

Love to my dear Roger from Mary x

To give up hope is a woeful thing
It leaves the mind an empty skin
With nothing to go around
And pointless visiting.

Love Mary x

CARRYING THE CANDLES.

Who will carry a candle
For those lost unseen
The people forgotten
Whose faces
Have no screen
The children
Without childhoods
Who die all alone
From starvation
And malnutrition
And those from drugs at home.

Today is a sad day
As we all reflect
That this human race
Is still under attack
Not from the outside
But inside ourselves
It only takes a little
To turn the human mind
From something
kind and loving
To a place that is blind.

For if we are not equal
However that be described
There will always be fighting
Deceit and lies
Will we ever see
A candle burning bright
Because we have extinguished
The darkness of the night.

To all those for whom today
7/7
Must be unbearable sorrow
I am sorry .

Love Mary ***

Let’s go high up as black dotted wings
Tempering the wind in search of home
Where no longer there is day and night
And together we float in the silver light.

Days of sorrow vanish in sunshine’s haze
The white cliffs throwing us their spray
In a goodbye gesture where the waves stay
And we’re leaving, out above the ocean today.

Love Mary x

British home stores once a week
We would meet Mum and I
Would sit for a while
Share fish and chips
Feed baby the bits
Go round the shops
Not buy a lot,
Then to walk home down country roads
Across the bridge, pushing the pram
Shopping in bags.
Home at last Mum and me gasped
For a cup of tea, slice of cake,
Freshly baked.
We bathed the baby, dressed her in
A pink babygrow,
Your first grandchild, I love you so.
Begins to get dark, walk you back to the bus stop
Watching the back of your tweed coat
And sensible shoes, I feel humble inside
That this gentle lady is my mother,
Go safely, I will ring tomorrow
Love Mary .




For my mum, Grace and first daughter and child, Katharine
Maria Kearns xxxxx

I’m going to be a diamond
Encrusted in gold
A piece of costume jewellery
Bought cheaply on the bold
It won’t be worth anything
But to hold a pretty wrap

Life follows this pattern
Dangling treasures in our wake
That afterwards mean nothing
But hold our namesake

A piece of broken glass
Glinting in the sun
The skeleton of a leaf
Unnoticed by some
Many a pretty thing
Lasts longer in our dreams.

Love Mary ***

Lying  in the sunshine
I turn to you and smile
Across the busy ocean
Where the tables are
Beneath a blue umbrella
Celebrating beer
I hear you calling out
We're having fun here
Sipping Costa coffee
From a cardboard cup
I know you are a-hatching
Writing another plot.

In my perfect quietness
I whisper in the sand
Thank you for the knowing
The lending of a hand
Tides will change
And boats come in
But our friendship
Will always
just begin.
Love Mary ***

Stand with me by the fence
Where all our life has been
The entrance to our hearts
And back again.

And if you have to weep
Not into the flowers
For they get enough rain
Love me, kiss me again.

Love Mary x

What do you do with my words
Stretched out upon your ceiling
To find in them meaning heard
What do you do with my world’s
I hear your words in mine
Conversing and dancing
Chasing each other across the globe
What do you do with my world’s.

Love Mary x

Everyday we separate from sheds of skin
The crack in the drainpipe gets wider
The moon changes position
The rain is borrowed damp
And I depart from the first place
I ever knew,
You .


Love Mary x
For my Rog love Mary

So there you stand dressing,
Tying that hair in the tightest bun
******* round with a ring
Your coat dangles fluffily in the wind
And he's waiting near the seat
Without wings, holding half a glass
Of lager.
Red shoes send you upstairs
Clickety-clack on the metal trims.
Then the children arrive from school
By taxi paid by you.
Now you're poorer
Than before
And the pub sells
Chips and beans.
The baby's smiling at
All of the people
So you can't win.
And daddy dangles
A silver chain
As if this is what you need.


Love Mary x

I think this is why you came to my room
On a sudden impulse that I would be there
Waiting for the person I needed but never said
The quiet brown bird with songs in his head
And you came because you saw in this child
A woman to grow your children and be a friend
The room was empty and the flowers gone
On the piano was your music I wanted to hear
Played softly with a warm heart and a longing
To stay.

I use to pick my blankets
Turn them into Jesus in the manager
With the coloured fluff from the ends
They were never there the next day
Absently been cleared away
With the making of the bed.
I missed them.

As I stand and think
Any ideas fall or rise
According to other elements
The day maybe cloudy
Or full up with fog
So remembering is banished
To the outskirts of town.
Seeded thoughts lie dormant
And in this metamorphosis
Take flight
Never to lighten the world
With a flowery rose
Or cast wisdom on the stone.
I might think mightily
But fall to earth in despair
Mistaken by virtue
Or an over risen ego.
And so the slow decent
Only to rise up
In fallow field made of straw.
Capture me whilst energy
Still flutters, before
Thought in its watery
Words is submerged.
For without it
I was not.

Love Mary

Forty years or so ago there was a boy
Who thought life was about building towers
And plastic ships
Out of all those Lego bricks.

His hands shook at every stage
Sometimes getting into a rage
Whilst others watched the tower tops
Hoping none of them would drop
Breaking dreams , beautifully seen.

Once you have glimpsed the stars
It stays within you at all hours
In the night when the moon's alight
It goes on in delight.

And now that age passed the infant blast.
This  boy, who is a man
Travelled throughout the land
Creating timelines in 3D
For other users eyes to see.





To Alex and Tasha and daughter's Evelyn and Florence
Who are all so creative.
Alex also built a Lego room.
Love Mum , Mary Grandma xxxx

When you were a little girl
I came to play each Monday
We had such fun as did Mum
Sitting at the covered table
Drawing pictures and writing poems
Cutting and sticking
Our hearts were glowing

We loved the dollies and the flowers
Cuddled up and played about
Barney came and looked around
To see if I had sweeties found
Milo in his pushchair
Dark brown eyes and softest hair
Always gave a smile to me
When I came and stayed for tea.

At your house I loved to be .


Love Mary

Thank you to Daisy ,Barney ,Milo and Katie , love Mummy ,Grandma ***

Float me Abraham in my country’s fields
Where the white mice come forth in shields
And bargain with the great provider that
We may cup the day of peace without harm.

For in the time of sanctities the cloak glows
And we look to freedom in those fields.

Love Mary ***

All our Christmases.

Standing at the window when the snow falls,
Feeling the coldness seep in
As the ice builds up on the ledges
It is Christmas Day.
The street is white tracks and on hedges
Peaks gather like our festive cake.
Under the window laid out in names
Are the unopened presents.
The fur tree, tallest ever,
Lights the room with its fairy bulbs.
Robins and plastic angels twirl in the heat.
I wear my cream jumper and tartan skirt
To begin the day.

Love Mary ***

We wait for you under an umbrella of love
Collected are your needs, neatly in a box
Surrounding you we look forward to the day
When we shall see your face, stroke your head
Arlo, stay safe little one in the waters of time
Knowing Grandma has you always in mind .

Love Grandma to Arlo ***

From leafy lane emerging into stroll
Along dusty track to terminate
In plastic buckets and spades
Colourful beach sandels displayed
And the smell of cheap meals and coffee.
In front the glistening sea resting far out
On golden plains of sand as it
Waits for its turning to bring in
Those lost shoes and silver foil ships.

Midday rays melt the rubber rings
And lilos tossed against catamarans
Beach hut families steam percolators
Stretching green striped towels in rows
Along the recast promenade.
Curved into a cove of quietness
The beach hides
Under a shelf of chalk stacked grass
The distinguished headland point.

Love Mary x

There is always a place and a time
To get back to
If only one could!
Where events, altered
One could have survived;
Chance conversations,
A casually read book,
Movements of oceans,
Chips in ones head,
A desire to be kissed,
A contemporary remake,
Lead to a disaster
At a later date.

Caught by one's Achille's heel
In a thicket full of trees
Climbing on a swan's back
In the middle of a breeze
Standing forever in that
Potential spot
Left open for a second
A dreadful plot.

Casting a fishing net into a pool
Searching for items thrown away
Too soon.
And I wonder if a bird's song
In a nearby tree
Could have brought me
Freedom and let me be.

Love Mary **

Mother put your sandals on and we shall walk a mile
Up the road and down again with you by my side
My feet will never falter, nor will my love ever fade
For what you have given me can never be replaced.



Love Mary to her Mother

I like paintings with passageways
They point you in two directions
Multispectival,
Metaphysical all the way.
In my hall is "The Courtyard",
A print by Pieter de *****,
It shows two Dutch ladies
Contemplating their chosen routes
One looks outward to the world
A solitary life,
The other in humble domesticity
A child playing at her feet.
Both cut off from the others world
One wonders what has changed
Are women any happier today
Combining two distinct domains.

I guess there are pros and cons
For all us women folk
Times when life fulfills ourselves
Others when we'd throttle throats.
Children need to be born
To continue the human race
We all need to put them first
So they can enjoy their race.

Love Maryx


My four children survived their upbringing
To be creative , loving individuals .

We took the gangway hand in hand
Turning on the sheltered rail
Clinging to our clipped tickets
Stating date and hour.
And up we ran our childish feet
All glorious for the open deck
And spread our arms to clap
The wind as speedily it did hit.

The water sunned in glistening troughs
The Solent with its spray
And at the bars and ropes we played
Waved to the sailing craft.
The captain in his tower room
Hooted now and then
And then turned a steep bend
To the Island that was our friend.

And bouncing on the harbour wall
Fell clambering down the steps
Broke the sunshine with our eyes
Never to forget.
Love Mary x

The curtains hung in loops
From the missing and broken
Those brittle plastic rail hooks
Unable to be replaced, renewed.

So in the bedroom light entered
From the grey day at their drape
Singing in her sixty seventh year
Her only son a birthday song.

Love Mary