My house is my home
And it goes where I roam
And as I grow big
So does it.
It’s always my size
Never too tight a fit
Though I eat and I graze
All night long.
Though it’s comfy and warm
And it keeps me from harm
I never eat in; watch TV.
So tonight I’ll eat out
While the birds not about
And I hope you won’t
Mind little me.
Poem and photo copyright Englepip©
Where dark skies glower o’er grey seas and greyer cliffs
Daily they search the shingle and the rocks for signs of fossils
Life which they say, once was; now gone;
Once flesh and bone; now become stone.
Following the shoreline, head bowed, sight funnelled
As with blinders, focussed but without the peripheral
The geologist scours the beach for proof of evolution.
While here sit I, above the littoral; looking down and out to sea
Along the coast of ancient rocks of times of my existence;
Jurassic coast, where time bleeds into the beach.
He sees his footprints in the sand, and I see mine;
For here we meet across millennia; in this place;
This earthly space where our soles show
That both our souls; have touched Creation.
When I visited the Jurassic coast of Dorset, England, recently, it was grey and overcast, eerie and moon-like, as though primordial times still existed. I could not help but picture the dinosaurs which once roamed here and whose fossilised bones sometimes fall (bleed) onto the beach as proof of an existence we can hardly imagine. Footprints too have been found along the coast and so often, as with much of mature, it is a case of being able to recognise, see things, which otherwise we might walk past. I imagined that the dinosaurs were still present as if in another time or realm, for we both walked this land; we are both part of creation.
Poem and photo copyright Englepip©
How does one deal with a brain that is blank
No interest in anything: dead?
How can one enthuse and react and excite
When the vacancy hangs like a cloud?
How can one exist in a life that seems full
Yet a whirlpool of nothingness looms?
How can one write when one’s mind can’t be found
When the Muse shuts all doors with dull sound?
I’ll sit here awhile and I’ll tap the keyboard
Try to shift torpor from my brain.
I’ll struggle to share the Lethe I feel,
Try to energise life from the depths;
And if even that fails, at least I’ll have tried
For my audience, a verse to provide.
Poem and photo copyright Englepip©
Your love is like a thistledown.
So soft and smooth, was our delight
As to lie upon it for the night.
You, my love, and I would bed,
A tender pillow at our head.
Under down that’s silky smooth,
As is your skin, which I had wooed.
But come the Spring with seeds unsprung
When new shoots shot and leaves unwound
Then spikes they grew with wretched prickles
To wreck our bed with constant bristles
And love which started gossamer-light,
Turned to splinters overnight –
That pricked and stuck beneath the skin,
Unleashing a spite that underpinned
A love not firm, based on flocculent things:
For thistledown that’s smooth without
Is treacherous, secret-sharp within;
Beguiling love: your gentleness
Has a knife-edged paradox built in.
Photo, poem and idea, copyright to Englepip©
Englepip's World 