Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Amy Dwyer  Aug 2013
Rainbow
Amy Dwyer Aug 2013
We know as children that you shouldn’t stare directly at the sun,
“You’ll go blind!” parents say. Still, we take mischievous glances,
Scared, brave. Trying to separate the perfect, lemony roundness, from the burnished halo all around.
I remember standing on the front path of my Aunts house,
Eagerly waiting for a solar eclipse, the pebbledash grazing my back.
4 children staring boldly through a square of tinted Perspex. It was novel.
The first time I looked at you, I looked away, eyes glaring, seeing white.
It was like looking at the sun, I needed the dull, brown tint.
Eyes adjusted. “Hiya!” you yelled. Golden

In the moments after the rain,
Look at the sun, in the moist air hangs a rainbow;
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
You’ve worn them all, not a colour left alone.
Joseph looks on, jealous, in his dull, lifeless overcoat.
You’re a solid rainbow, one that you can touch, feel, put your arms around.
Laugh with, learn with, drink with, dance with, love with.
A rainbow personified.

For L.C
neth jones Jan 15
clue time   game of bluff-man blind   fuss of obstacles scold up my mind -(the-vermin-are-quite-rife) / portrait, ambitious portrait   racing a train - broadsword toward - a fertile pocket of prissy death ;/ crown, fist and sprawl in the court of The Charmers   sole hissy-fit upon your knees
had the song This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us by Sparks stuck in my head when i wrote this and two other shorts
We love urban, ice wrapper choc full, dense with matter, cream the power runs through, finding space, each cell. Unit, one by one, stacked upon deck, pile, floating concrete and multi access path. Crank each floor, glass patent steel, glint the Thames, Humber and Clyde, a boat in the reflection, slum cleared gentle penthouses on the other side. Dogged, ***** not allowed, Barking, Hackney, Toxteth, Little Ireland aka Cardiff gone. Dodo, hatchet, escalate poverty, high rise cool, the high rise flat.  Crowning glory, a sea of chiming memories, stirs the tenement cat. Swept beneath the paradigm, catapult off the parapet, somersault into a different time, moonlit skyscrapers, street sweepers become the concrete and the fifty foot glass dancers, cross between the cargo arches, gargoyles and shields bring them to the ground. The twisted metal of prams and brand new cars grind, traffic in drones, and the city drowns. Strip turn central, gorgeous girl, Hoxton lad, a touch too Dad, deposit on a Liverpool street pad, generation retro spinning fractal, money linear pavement uber yellow, scuttling insects and street martins, skylarks flying Saint Pauls cross and ball bearings, shopping centres unending. Biting into Cheapside, the hidden livers, gold delivers, pure to stay the shivers, the office block rises. Sharp bends, the bridge divides, shark rides the sky, dumps the bank and pierces its side, docks in every city worldwide, rivers pink with the ticklish blood of regicide. Pumpish, Victorian, sweet and blue, the older the City the quicker the glue. Mortar rectified a moment to ***** and overawe you. Shock, new wave architecture, backhanded awe. Brum pill wave beast eat your heart out, find another Chinese storm, currency blizzard, scales hardly balance, aha you had it, now you simply own. Own the moment, the pebbledash, corrugated roof, outside toilet and underground transit. We love urban, your moment we cherish and drain, there is nothing we can’t refuse to understand, too complex to refrain. Bounce as we ride the terrace and its suburban long train. Take your sweetheart on the nightbus, ****** him her, the hier of your plane, that’s where they will love you in the memories of the life near the top floor, and the final flight you were too drunk to gain. Seventy Two, you’re only thirty and you’re on forty one. You’ll fall back or you’ll begin ascendency. Shrink with wisdom, pick up the building, a tool, dreaming of scaling London, young a journeyman, jousters young son, learned, resisted the gun. I’ll fight with two hands, pile bricks or guide with a pen. Draw your city, write my memory, bind moment with every fragment, underpath, cycle through. Lights fading, jumping colours in the district where the girls who live the density beyond you and me, each element boiling their hearts and steaming potent New York’s paths. You had poetry in the apron of your mother’s lap, golden syrup and milky sap. You love urban, fifties bubble contrast in your seventies shunted through urban oasis and with that unknown factor, uber bijou, ‘Finding Nemo’ flat. We are urban, you are fashion, you are the generation that copied that, found the culture in the swinging city, post uni shack. Seven Eleven, Atlantic side heaven, promised more than double checking your watch before bedtime. Look at your daughter, she’s got ‘more than’ you hoped for, already in the palm of her sleeping hands, waking up to a metropolis only she will understand.
Nothing but wind and the pebbledash rain
and the squabbling cats outside the window again.

roll on Summer, I so wish that it was,
like a roll on deodorant and not just because
I like the Sun,
I also like the cold winter snow,
the glow of a nicely banked fire,
the smell from the kitchen and
other people I know feel the same.

Nothing but wind and the pebbledash rain and somewhere not far away the whistle of a train, ( I might have imagined that )
the cats have gone quiet, perhaps one got its way, but it looks awfully like the wind's here to stay.

I'm going dreaming or fishing whichever comes first.
Negative,
live and live or die and slave to sieve your life through the fine light wire
where the buyer controls the market and the product is factory made.

I was conceived in a small town East of the city of spires,
one of many in the land of Shakespeare and Shires and fired in the kiln with the clay from the pit
hardened and *** red with pebbledash dreams setting suns in my young head,
for a bit it was fine and the wire didn't cut,
but when you're dead you don't know that the way it is so is not the only way to go,
sold out and told off and mixed up I coughed up my penny for the guy toll which rolled into the gutter, a puppet on strings to stutter his way to the factory where scissors are polished by steel wool to finish the job.

The old man, my father knew better than I who gets by on a wing and a gallon of grog and the dog doesn't mind being cussed by the master, just as on the Dansette we go round and round and the stylus is us being stuck in a groove.

I move on in tandem with me and my random collection of thoughts and things I have bought though not factory, there's too much of that stuff and it bungs up the works and clogs all the gubbins.

Here's enough time to live and to live it right here or the engineer may turn us to burn us once more,
the overseer sees everything, hears the 5 o-clock bell ring and me with a wing and a gallon of grog.
Lewis Wyn Davies Sep 2020
I

In the garden with the cherry tree -
where daffodils curb the fence -
cats in long grass stalk the birds
and the rhubarb patch is bursting.

The back of next door's shed.
A white wall of pebbledash.
It's one almighty canvas,
the same size as a goal.

II

In the garden with a trampoline centre -
first love sits poised in morning air -
though we haven't shut our eyes all night,
we're more alive than ever here.

King of the burning woodpile.
Trimmed weeds in a mound.
Neighbours chirping out of view.
Sport scores over a blaring tune.

III

In the garden that's become a home -
close to my place of worship -
guests wave outside the temple,
years and years of well-wishers.

Looking out for hedgehogs.
Feeding a family of foxes.
Like a wave in my brain,
memories come flooding in.

IV

In the garden that was aforementioned -
long after daylight has drowned -
a friend of mine sits next to me
and we gaze through broken cloud.

We've seen everything here:
sun, rain, snow and hail.
This garden knows all my pain
and has helped me to heal.
Poem #12 from my collection 'A Shropshire Grad'.
Stephen Moore Sep 2019
Heaven was 1977.

See how the Vauxhall Viva rusts aside shooting rhubarb,
How the shed tumbles in golden creosote,
A gate latches with a clunk and there I stand on pebbledash shed tile,
Pushing red Raleigh Grifter to shed with  the family rides.

A cat slinks towards a Whiskas tin a rattling under winding can opener and I am back in 1977.

Heaven was 1977.

Vicky Kingsford was by my side.

Sun played on my home and I was in heaven.
Mary Gay Kearns Mar 2018
On the longest road was our home
At the top where the road flops
Bending slightly to the east
From pebbledash to brick clad
This bend left our sight undone
Could not see when Mum did come
Round the corner in her coat
Carrying all the food she'd bought
Gentle corner I loved your curve
Gave us time to put away
Prepare ourselves for all to come
Especially the comfort of our Mum.

Love Mary **
There'll be a whitewash
and a pebbledash
and then they'll tell you
it was You
responsible for the crash.

They add up numbers
join the dots
then they call the cops
and you're nicked.

You've never picked a loser
but believe it
we're on one now.
Sam Lawrence Apr 2020
A half inflated football
Thuds against pebbledash
Garage door thunderclap
Announces childhood
Attention spans
Across the cul-de-sacs
Estate to estate
Squeezed between the tip
Of the town planner's 2H pencil
And the flick of a syringe
Stupified by sunshine
Half baked by boredom
The grubby kids
With their snot soaked sleeves
Kicking out in the dusty leaves

— The End —