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Month: January 2018

A walk

A walk

Published by Adrian North on 29 January 2018

The grey cold of winter rain
lashes face and hands and me.
Raven clouds dark as my damaged thoughts
lie overhead, threatening, sinister.
Muddy paths leading to muddy places
through trees scoured clean by loathsome storms.
Past verdant leaves indifferently slaughtered
scud across my shadowed dreary view.
Hearing no-one, seeing no-one and being no-one
trudging onward, slipping, stumbling, sliding, swearing.
My mood as black as longest night
companion to my wary winter woodland wander.
Sombre thoughts of death unfettered rise
unbidden to my mind.
I must escape this path, this wood, this life
or stay forever snared in this leafless, lifeless grove.
I reach the edge of brooding breathless copse
driven to the open fields of freedom before me.
And still the grey cold of winter rain
lashes face and hands and me.

07/02/2017

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I Found A Photograph

I Found A Photograph

Published by Adrian North on 26 January 2018

I found a photograph the other day
Of me in younger clothes
Squirreled away buried in battered cardboard cave
Dingy, dusty, damaged,
Dumped in haste behind old books
In a long forgotten corner
Of an aged loft
Where all my other junk
Of long past lives
Lies forlorn, discarded
And there I saw
The well remembered outline of my youth
The thirsty eyes
Full of hope
And love
And innocence
The widely smiling mouth
Whose wisdomed words
Like golden oration spewed forth
Unfettered by latter doubts
But heeded only by unheeding night
Those ears so often catching
Sounds of joy
And laughter
And pain
And longing
The shoulders broad like Atlas
Yet tender
Refuge for tormented souls
The arms full ardour
But loveless left
The hands so willing
But always clumsy
Tripping over words
And tasks
And life
And I in longing know
That this is how I want to be
And not this deserted frame
That I have now become
Oh the years have turned
And I have turned
Into dust and yearning and nought
Tumbling to my inexorable end
Of dust and dull oblivion

10/02/2017

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A walk along a river bank

A walk along a river bank

Published by Adrian North on 22 January 2018

Through the chill mist comes the honk of lonely goose
From an island over in the stream
Somewhere out of view
In the grey light of early day

In the field cattle stand
Lowing, guiding the days bright entrance
Chewing cud and grass
Viewing world with watchful eye

From nowhere the wheezing whoosh of wings
Tells us of swans arising
On tall columns of milk frothed air

Ahead on dewy bank
A heron statued stands
A grey sentry to our approach
Along path
Sided sometimes by sloes
In their season

Distant comes the whispering
Watery sound of weir
And mill and stream
And the church bell tolling
This hour of dawn

At the gate in the corner we turn
And homeward head
To a world more frantic
Than this timeless place

22/04/1998

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The shadows that we cast – Three poems in one

The shadows that we cast – Three poems in one

Published by Adrian North on 19 January 2018

The shadows that we cast
On life
Are transient fleeting
Ghosts of what might have been
And then they change
To what we have become

The shadows that we cast
Dance on the background
Of reality
And dim and fade and flit
As do our beings
In the universe

The shadows that we cast
Reflect how we are viewed
By existence
And when they cease
In the light of a new dawn
So do we

18/09/1998

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What has passed

What has passed

Published by Adrian North on 17 January 2018

The leaves are turning now
Away back home
Nights are drawing in
Wood fires lit
Against late evening cool
Mists in early noon
Rolling over stubbled fields
From river turgid, slow
With a thousand remembrances
Yet here I am
Tied to the past
With pale recollections
To keep me sound
In this strange land
Of heat and dust and toil
Kept  in motion
By unresolved yearnings
To return
To what I was
05/09/2009

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Life’s long hunger