Poetry Blog by Adam Whitworth

It dawns on me at last
the storm clouds I have turned and turned to evade
yoke firmly to the schist beneath my feet, 
dark with familiar paths I can never scrub.
From here, say summer picnic leftovers, 
no bee would buzz far. The opposite of a poem, 
a passing sportscar suggests, is a bad poem. 
But a true-coloured reflection, 
the old ram at the fence boldly declares,
is indulged gl...

Read and leave comments (0)

Figure of fun, stinking of piss?
That old man is Wordsworth in the field,
patriarch to small capped heads. But you
fail to recognise Socrates in the market and there 
springs your catastrophe. Yours 
is now the society of a bullet entering the head
repeated in slow motion, repeated ad nauseum.
Take pride in tall towers if you must,
who now can record faithfully their collapse?

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷 (1)

A lifetime of wide-eyed skywatching but now 

a glimmering lantern I blindly clutch for

 in or out of this world. A sober Moon incises: 

songs and spells of comfort tell

she is great, synonymous with real magic.

Every part of herself from nothing to all

given and taken through every season.

Long through my benighted dramas, selfish episodes, 

never once has she tur...

Read and leave comments (0)

Lay in the trench 

bean, barley, corn,

twisted in silken sheets

your love dreaming.

In all the lord's land they lay 

shark-jaw traps.

Young englishman,

walk the safe way home.

Read and leave comments (2)

Little Jenny Shorthose yelled down the well
for the thrill of any answer. Bright days.
Now she calls from the bottom of the well.
Dark day, can she hope to find an answer?

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (1)

When the caveman met the civilised man
impressively, one did not kill the other.

Each had skills the other understood
would take long practise to equal.

Instantly created sign language
deepened their understanding.

Each was amused, wondering if
they could make it in the other's world.

For simple joy in the parabola they threw 
between them a small green sphere.

I believe i...

Read and leave comments (2)

🌷 (2)

Emerging from grey, a cool green garden 

has no audience at all.

As the music you practise

you practise for its own sake.

As aerial larks have sung, always sing,

for very particular ears.

Resisting analysis an artwork

in silver much clearer than gold.

Your prophet's tears dew on foxes

returned to the hole for the day.

And aerial larks have sung, always si...

Read and leave comments (4)

🌷 (2)

Just for today, let us declare,
there is an amnesty on dangerous words-
before slammed doors, smashed cups. Broken hearts.
Calmly, quietly, lay your shocking words on the table.
In honesty there's no authority here and no criminal,
Steely words come softly from both sides of the table.
Shorn of spikey rhythm, long-writhing rhetoric 
lies still, lamb-like; object of sympathetic tears.

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷 (2)

Your depths wait like

a sombre boy's rockpool.

Focus of a cornflower-blue dome,

catching echoes of those

animalicules designed to hide.

Yes, your depths wait.

Fevers you feel will subside

with the blinding sapphire blue- 

loved ones consider lightly;

the kraken thinks best to hide.

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷 (1)

    As loath to cease breathing

the briefest interruption -count in minutes-

of young lovers begins, as so much,

with an exchange: the parting kiss.

    Thoughtfully curry-combing horses before 

one long dark trek; sharing silently 

the feast to safeguard against famine.

    Art's lady, you draw a timeless moment into time;

giving the perfect answer without a question ...

Read and leave comments (0)

Is the gulf so wide
that we no longer look over clearly?

However great a part of humanity: 
apart is not nearly enough.

When reason borders on unreasonable
where do you draw the line?

Conquest confounds poetry
in the soul, a trophy never enough.

Will efforts to camouflage the obvious
spiral into loveless isolation?

Alien antennae pierce armoured skies.
Beyond the pale is ...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (1)

Silence seems to be practising on me
from that uncertain distance 
where the sky meets the sea. 
Looking so far without obstacle
I don't know what I perceive.
Is that the other bank of a vast river,
and how might things be viewed from there?

On a day like this great ocean is
laying foam upon the sands
awakening my toes way down there
miles above my head wide sky is
throwing halcy...

Read and leave comments (3)

🌷 (1)

Handsome oak tree, one grand thread,

but split, split, split. Tangle of limbs,

cloud of leaves, your thread is

a network of veins; what is more

alive than you? What years have you

not known, and intimately:

their seasons have a particular ring

in your meticulous soul.

Unaware of my second nature

still you know how I plague a world

-it is in the air that sustains ...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (1)

They're making trees out of paper!

Oh, it's all in a good cause.

One leaf says "I wish I was better."

So many others are much worse.

What leapt out at me in the cold 

corridor, where anyone might pass 

was a crinkled leaf I had stooped to pick 

from the tiles, which read

"Am I going home with you?"

Well, no one paints just to cover the canvas

as we speak politely...

Read and leave comments (0)

An April morning in silence crept past the night

but she the dreamer had woken and found 

lodged in her mind a bare line...

At once she knew it was a poem's title

as an egg in a nest is known to be sacred

and more- from her other world- she'd seen it

writ large for scholars on the old blackboard

When she told me- yes, forgive me

I am the most fortunate of men...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (3)

Here we are again for self-improvement

I see a hippo-like creature
has become a whale

and though her soul be polluted
with poison through unfair ages
she has pledged to pilot the man to safety
whose fate is with the cruel sea

here we are again

excavating on waking
at the site of the mirage

and there our nightmares are piled high
with all that cannot harm us
oddities brought u...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (2)

When the poets hear my name

   they are humming bird tongues

burning spears converging

   they would dissolve

   the only way they know how

speak of all things past

   refuse to concede and think it victory

   steeped in sweet intoxication

   deep as death and no more
 

words

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (3)

I knew her mother
christened her Untold
nobody has found why
my lot call her Mary
when they call her
Mary of the storm's eye

"you know I love you..."
her old poetry
nobody could resist
following closely
only to repent
the visions madly wished

I do not blame her
call her to account
nor denigrate her
in words less craven
the portrait painted
feeds our brooding nature

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷 (2)

Eased into a situation...
Erased without explanation.
Quick to sing O but wrong notes flow-
Quartet, trio, duet. solo.
Upward citizens of the light?
Underground? Wed to endless night.
Another change is due, is due
As ever the struggle doth prove.
Led to believe the old gestalt:
Less than an angel by default.

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (2)

Nightingale piercing

Near nearer morning

Around the roses the buzzing

Among stars still twinkling

Time's jaws a lion's kiss-of-death

Tomorrow equal to yesterday

Unless dreamers cede to fog

Unless lovers would love less

Remember summer and winter

Replay their saintly favours

Etching into eternity

Each captive heart's sonnet

Read and leave comments (0)

Last chancer president makes sure to win before he plays

   like a foxhunter with his fox for the hunt in a cage.   

         How the same should a watcher make rare birds appear?

Why, clockwork gate of bravura movement

   (lent from the suite museum of nightmares) 

      determine the fate of him too long away?

Close on him as slow as the hours 

   he...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (1)

Just tell me straight
why are your poems so hard, so abstract.

Well, I certainly can't say I don't have a past.

A hairbush on the table
the couple parting
specifics laid out sadly as cliches
the state of the sky in the evening
all your anecdotes more and more burdensome

No. I'm stuck with my style
and when my rocket-fuel runs low
I'll be writing about another side of the unive...

Read and leave comments (3)

🌷 (3)

I am an idolator and all my works are good

I have long fought shrieking cutting air

Wrest free at last these few words I have

Now to mould them for my gentler aims

I am an idolator and all my works are good

The ideal image holds children giggling

Waving their feet in a watercourse sparkling

Warmth of the lone Sun glow upon them

I am an idolator and all my works are good

...

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷 (3)

A plectrum in the dust I saw today
   a blast from the past it made me smile
      knowing so many wouldn't even know
         what it was it brought to mind the poem:

Kingdoms Without Letters

Unfamiliar yet frightful all
The shell-thin skulls just like mine.
An incomprehensible vortex of their movements

Resolves to nothing while I catch up on sleep.
I might speculate on their ...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (1)

I present myself as prisoner 
all the while 
I present myself as lord

Sighing the crass song
"Dear Vanity, Your Uncertain Steps"
eyeing the Greek statuette
my straight borders, monoculture lawn

I have thought my garden a model
in good taste, now I cannot say
I have thought it 
a mazing absurd joke, but no.

O, Amazonia you are wild and infinite
I hear you rage from my shallow...

Read and leave comments (2)

🌷 (1)

A star already cold has sent you a poem

Poetry, if said often and loud enough,
has the substance of a rock

Come, make yourself comfortable
find one that suits, smooth and human-sized,
sit half-way up a mountain just for the view 

Trusty pen and paper wouldn't pretend
to capture a complete panorama
rest your mind- this gets easier

These lines now tell 
of people as you know and lo...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (2)

mama lives in the past
she's been in her element
since the advent
of photography

papa looks to futures
for insurance purposes
parallel universes 
all well catered for

they fight as if for their lives
only to share all they have
bequeathing to you and I
all that is now dubious 

Read and leave comments (0)

A patch of dry powdery soil
perfectly square (it has been measured)
only the shiniest conkers
mark the boundary at two inch intervals.
It's a desert or a chinese garden or 
the ideal worksite for mini-diggers,
it's a project of my son and heir.
Only now do I read and write
and keep abreast of the news,
and speak to you on the phone
but let's keep it brief okay?
I'm also his assista...

Read and leave comments (0)

The scapegoat role intact
as high festivities begin
hard on the heels of a time
ringed by those who despised him
now to show no recourse to anger
small breasts exposed to enrage him
with pebbles to the head
the young will forever test him 

"I count on those penned in a bowl-shaped church
the congregation of the basin pooled 
and a simple word preached over- voila"

As grown from...

Read and leave comments (0)

What silhouette fills the archway  

heavy shadow of another life's war?

What giant against the sky dominating parent

who has found you out- where you are the authority- 

here in your own dream ? Look again. 

It is the green knight reaching to fulfill his quest.

Why you, and this night?

The night papillon muses on the wall

wishful the sky be filled with colour.

How a...

Read and leave comments (1)

...returning your stare. She is

too small to speak, she is

dying. She- gone, ah, football!

And what's this? Going through 

your bins. How you hate it so

close to home; the cheek of it. 

Invalid old crone, dirty thing.

Ding dong. Jesus Christ. Now what 

do they want? You don't 

have to answer that...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (3)

    This is good- we are in each other's dream:
quilling ribbons, pastel slivers 
like as moonlight, as a feather
strong as bronze or marble together.
It is good, a double helix in smoke.

    History sets a shipwreck on the reef
it's lesson torn away by howling winds.

    So early in the day without fail
hear the tortured creaking
rise to the present crisis.
This caricature depi...

Read and leave comments (1)

he goes as the crow flies
she in her own fashion

slow, slowly she approaches
the huddled herd lain for warmth 
so persuasive the weighty mass
she will decide when to abandon them

he sketches spires and hedges
she knows the edible mushrooms dell

he will see her before they meet
his hand in the fire by choice
in silent frost-crisp morn
who has the power cannot be said
frost-gr...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (3)

That's me
swung on the climbing bars like
a hero from tales of long ago
lost or won the battles
more forgotten than remembered

Unconscionably fortunate am I-
I have a new history, the one I love
steers close as on a river and all 
the banks are green

Light mesmeric but reflects itself
dazzles and pleases where
illusion fails to cool the air
no attitude ungreens contours
lay down t...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (2)

Leave the door open
for me to take what I like
okay
like a poem
and I'll not frame you
as the final scene
feel free to whisper my name
anytime
hold back the winds
let's keep this valley, its sirens, quiet
for after all we know well enough 
it's a storm in a teacup
sugar?
Thankyou kindly you wait so long
I know you have so much for me
for you I have a whole world 
under my ephe...

Read and leave comments (0)

The Truth-
I am an octopus
carried up and down in truth
an unborn child immersed
with no need to speak of
the truth

who has truth conjoined with proof?
they don't rhyme well except
for impatient men, for them
proof is of the past, there has been a test
now truths in the pocket
tumble safe as coins

look up to the blackboard
constellations to be named
plough, macaw, rhishi, which w...

Read and leave comments (0)

As foreseen the lion's jaw widens
and through it's moment of perfection
becomes a teapot losing its lid
in the nature of clouds to alter and collide
up there are examples to follow for the while
my small print checking weevil
becomes your firebrand cuckoo
faces slam into mountainsides
and palaces lost to the landslide 
leave mere quills from the goose
bountifully high white pillows
...

Read and leave comments (0)

🌷 (1)

The facts lay spread out
like a liner launched on film
the Englishman looked where
it all made sense, to him
the young lady he'd found, who'd found him,
found it all added up to her
time was made- as it should be,
allowing that they should learn

The englishman made himself a shed
his specialism he refined
young lady too specialised 
their common ground was never mind
and how they con...

Read and leave comments (2)

🌷 (1)

The crew read the heavens above as a chart 
and below the barely moving moonlit waves.
Some poets take up their pens to write.
Seasoned wood and strong ropes creak in the hush
and SPLASH- a young lad meets the ocean.
But why?

He believed the heavens to be more than a chart
and he proved himself the ocean is deep.
Afraid the bards had festered, he would only go
his own way.

Now I...

Read and leave comments (0)

Another sea-city has grown up
sand upon sand, what else
stirrings of the deep so loud
it is a wall and little else

of designs fantastic and outlandish
made to survive their day in the heart
here is the latest-

channels open to the sea,
whose crashes, sprays and roars
move closer

defence repaired and repaired again
embellishment imagined, as quickly
put in place

an orderly...

Read and leave comments (1)

🌷 (1)