Week 43 – Photograph by Chris Sims
This week’s beautiful poems took me to unexpected places. The winner is a newcomer to Poetry Space, Glenda Brown with Leaving (poem 3). Many congratulations Glenda. Thanks to everyone who entered and voted.
Poem 1
Seeing Machine
Lines sharpen, far away things seem close,
What was blurred now clear
As land after rain. All that we might lose,
Choose to disregard, infuse
With unimportance just to cope,
All that once we could see,
Again appears much as it used to be.
Life once closed now runs with hope;
For sighted moments no fear
Holds us; all can be seen;
Things that once deceived
Us at distance mean,
Between there and here, something. Routine
Correctors of eyes,
Made fashionably bright
By designer frames, surprise.
We’ve seen, rejoiced, received.
Michael Docker
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Poem 2
Without spectacles
one cannot hear the silence
of the empty page.
Daphne Milne
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Poem 3
Leaving
She didn’t mean to leave
when she left; glasses
and paper accusatory,
abandoned on the cusp
of purpose; a sonnet,
a Jane Eyre, perhaps.
No scratched marks of life:
a refined, elegant fade,
often thought best. Truth,
a splayed mess, ought
never to be seen in public:
but death’s uncouth.
Glenda Brown
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Poem 4
Another New Page
Another new page.
This time will be different,
The future starts here.
Martin John
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Poem 5
My Beautiful Eyes
Large eyelashes
irrigating eye colour
over-time vision
leaving eyes texture like grit
sand that made my eyeglasses.
Johanna Boal
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Poem 6
In Absentia
Nothing
No muse
No inspiration
Unsullied
Virgin paper
Mocks me
Empty
Like my life
Carol Mills
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Poem 7
Mad As a Box of Frogs
Seen without my glasses, the blank page,
Bathed in pools of liquid lamplight, is just a blur:
Streaked with bubbling tadpoles not yet
Bursting from their jelly sacs;
No peeping bull-frogs, cheeping tree-frogs;
No charming princes here yet leaping.
Seen without my glasses, the blank page
Is the bleached white beech-wood timber
Of the ancient farmhouse kitchen table
Where first I learned to read and write.
It is as scoured, just as scary
As my empty, jumbled head.
Seen without my glasses, the blank page
(Even in this asylum’s quiet retreat
With the stagnant pool of lamplight over-spilling me)
Is empty of those popping, hopping frogs
Leap-frogging round my heated brain.
All words are slippery, in retreat.
Lizzie Ballagher
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Poem 8
A Spectacle
He SCREAMED
As if his voice protested
To be in any way connected
To such a failure of a poet
Who can’t compose a simple sonnet
He tried
To think of what to write
He wanted art
And not some blight
Of scattered marks on worn out sheets
Just lines and nothing in between
He’d trashed his room and broke his chair
And yet that paper still lay there
Without a single ink-stained notion
It only smirked in the commotion
He closed his eyes and took a breath
Removed his cape; his writer’s specs
Prepared his brain to fill the page
He waited…
But nothing came
Hannah Southworth
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Poem 9
Page Turned
The page fresh turned,
you laid down your glasses,
ran thick fingers through white hair,
pinched the top of your nose,
pen still in mouth,
coffee cup cooling adjacent.
At a stroke
you left
the cottage you loved,
as sun played on blackbirds
and dappled blue tits,
whilst wasps and bees
buzz the blackberries,
the diary of the gardener came to end.
Andrew Scotson
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Poem 10
My Father’s Eyes
With mind and heart’s eye,
as clear as if he were here,
I see the beloved man
who passed
long
ago.
He recognised the ridiculous,
appreciated the surreal.
I hear his voice say,
‘Keep an eye
on
that!’
Stephanie Haxton
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