Jamaican Bus Ride

The live fowl squatting on the grapefruit and the
bananas in the basket of the copper-coloured lady
is gloomy but resigned.
The four very large baskets on the floor
are in everybody's way,
as the conductor points out
loudly, often, but in vain.

Two quadroon dandies are disputing
who is standing on whose feet.

When we stop, a boy vanishes through the door marked ENTRANCE;
but those entering through the door marked EXIT
are greatly hindered by the fact that when we started
there were twenty standing,
and another ten have somehow inserted themselves
into invisible crannies
between dark sweating bodies.

With the odour of petrol
both excessive and alarming

we hurtle hell-for-leather between crimson bougainvillea blossom
and scarlet poinsettia
and miraculously do not run over
three goats, seven hens and a donkey
as we pray
that the driver has not fortified himself
at Daisy's drinking saloon
with more than four rums:
or by the gods of Jamaica
this day is our last!

By A.SJ. Tessimond

Marsh Marigolds

Here in the water- meadow
Marsh marigolds blaze
Brighten the elder shadows
Lost in an autumn haze.

Drunkards of sun and summer
They keep their colours clear,
Flaming among the marshes
At waning of the year.

Thicker than bee-swung clovers
They crowd the meadow space;
Each to the mist that hovers
Lifts an undaunted face.
Time, that has stripped the sunflower
And driven the bees away,
Hath on these golden gipsies
No power to dismay.

Marsh marigolds together
Their ragged banners lift
Against the darkening weather,
Long rains and frozen drift:
They take the lessening sunshine
Home to their hearts to keep
Against the days of darkness,
Against the time of sleep.

by Nora Hopper

Iron Landscapes

(and the Statue of Liberty)

Image taken from http://www.kidport.com/RefLib/SocialStudies/Landmarks/images/StatueLiberty.jpg
Please (Click) on image to view Times Square live.

No trellises, no vines

                                    A fire escape
Repeats a bare black Z from tire to tire.
Hard flower, tin scroll embellish this landscape.
Between iron columns I walk towards the pier.

And stand  a long time at the end of it
Gazing at iron on the New Jersey side.
A girdered ferry-building opposite.
Displaying the name LACKAWANNA,seems to ride

The turbulent brown-grey waters that intervene
Cool seething incompletion that I love.
The zigzags come and go, sheen tracking sheen;
And the water wrestles with the air above.

But I am at peace with the iron landscape too,
hard because buildings must be hard to last
-Block cylinder, cube, built with their aannngles  true.
A dream of righteous permanence, from the past.

In Nixon's era, decades after the ferry,
The copper embodiment of the pieties
Seems hard, but like a revolutionary
With indignation, constant as she is

From here you can glimpse her downstream,  her far charm,
Liberty, tiny woman in the mist
-You cannot see the torch- raising her arrmmm
Lorn bold, as if saluting with her fist.

By Thom Gunn

Campeachy Picture

The sloop's sails glow in the sun; the far sky burns,
Over the palm-tree tops wanders the dusk.
About the bows a chuckling ripple churns;
The land wind from the marshes smells of musk.
A star comes out; the moon is a pale husk;
Now, from the galley door, as supper nears,
Comes a sharp scent of meat and spanish rusk
Fried in a pan. Far aft, where the lamp blears,
A seaman in a red shirt eyes the sails and steers.

Soon he will sight that isle in the dim bay
Where his mates saunter by the camp-fire's glow;
Soon will the bird's scream, scared, and the bucks bray,
At the rattle and splash as the anchor is let go;
A block will pipe, and the oars grunt as they row,
He will meet his friends  beneath the shadowy trees,
The moon's orb like a large lamp hanging low
Will see him stretched by the red blaze at ease,
Telling of the Indian girls, of ships and of seas.

  By John Masefield

The Oasis of Sidi Khaled

How the earth burns! Each pebble underfoot
Is as a living thing with power to wound.
The white sand quivers, and the footfall mute
Of the slow camels strikes but gives no sound,
As though they walked on flame, not solid ground.
'Tis noon, and the beasts' shadows even have fled

Back  to their feet, and there is fire around
And fire beneath, and overhead the sun.
Pitiful heaven! What is this we view?
Tall trees, a river, pools where swallows fly,
Thickets of oleander where doves coo,
Shades, deep as midnight, greeness for tired eyes.
Hark, how the light winds in the palm-tops sigh.
Oh this is rest. Oh this is paradise.

By Wilfred Scawen Blunt.

A picture taken of the Great Orme, Llandudno.

Please (click) to find out more about the area.

Dolphin Watching

Binoculars cut off the bay and tilt
At the green sea like a page, I sit and stare
Watching as if for meaning to appear
"There" you say, but it's too hard for me;
The uncoordinated  sea yields only
Patches of peacock blue of wondering
turquoise,
Cliff-shadow, cloud-shadow shoal-shadow
Nothing that stays.
If only, you say we had come on some calm
evening.
Then in a mirror sea the dolphin's barrel,
 Leaping in sport. You want me to see
them.
I look again. Was that a fin, that curve?
Nothing for sure, We give up take the path
Above the high cliffs in the summer wind
You honour with their names the near at hand,
Purple moor-grass, vetch, the sprinkled gold
of lady's bedstraw, sea-blue stars of squill.
I taught you, once, a little, now you know
Far more than I did then,  and I have forgotten
Even the small gate keeper, that lover
Of warm light and lilac bramble - flower
No, I could teach you nothing now, unless
 A never disappointed ness, to fill
So many days between the dolphin days
A fall back from the rare miraculous
To earth and sky, and the sunlight on the gorse.

By David Sutton

  The Garden at Giverny

Delphiniums, sweet williams,
purple gladioli,
against yellow asters, marigolds,
the whirl of sunflowers;
glimpsed against emerald shutters.
A bamboo grove
lurks in the shadows by the lily pond.
patient as a tiger.
Lovers kiss on a Japanese bridge
watched by the bearded phantom
from behind the willows,
sad as a blind girl in a summer garden.

By Adrian Henry

Please (Click) to visit the Garden