End of the Line

Your bed is empty and bathed in an eerie moon glow.
Like an altar
with shadows of a darkened hospital ward fretting at its edges.

Silence

No-one at the desk.

For that one moment I am all life
mocked by the death I was too late to reach.
Another evening dash which this time missed its connection.
You never waited

for one final stilted conversation

one final goodbye

one last chance for me to chisel through your granite layers
and touch the beat of your heart.

Left behind is this cathedral space
still not big enough
for a hundred questions.
A thousand regrets.

Poetry in novels

‘Some days are born ugly.’ What a great start to a chapter. And a few pages later the same author penned this poetic piece: ‘…red geraniums burned the air around them. The delphiniums were like little openings in the sky.’ The writer? John Steinbeck. I have come late into his fold. After being won over by Cannery Row, which I read several months ago, I am now reading his follow up Sweet Thursday from which the quotes come.
Once again we meet the likes of Doc, Mack, Ed, the Bear Flag, the Palace Flophouse … but it’s Steinbeck’s ability to take a group of disparate people (bums, hookers, drunks), set them in a two-bit ordinary coastal Californian town and weave a marvellous story that careers through a whole range of human emotions.
And the package is laced with some stunning prose – lines and phrases that, as a poet, you just wished you thought of!

Interestingly, when reading the current issue of Rialto this morning I came across a poem by Mimi Khalvati – Bringing Down The Stars – which opens up with the following lines:

As a mouse sniffs for cheese, so I, reading novels,
am sniffing out scintillas. Sometimes they are few

but enough to keep me going, at other times rare
and completely enchanting, whole pages, paragraphs,

bringing starlight down to earth.

Whether author or poet, words used well can just lift you into wonderful realms.

Haiku Central

In a dense mist listen
and the river will whisper to you
~
Butterflies surfing sun-streams,
white ghosts
lacing flower to flower.
~
Out of a slate sky
rain hammers nails
into the window panes.
~
So let the stars stay up there,
you can still touch them in the river
~
Clouds drift over the ridge,
silent lands
searching for new horizons.