‘Poem:Films’ For National Poetry Day – 8 October 2015
Caroline Areskog Jones has created two shorts using words from my poems.
‘Parakeet’ and ‘Chaining the Ecstatic‘
View the ‘Poem:Films’ on youtube:
Parakeet
Chaining the Ecstatic
Texts of the poems:
Parakeet
You were brought here caged
then let go
you stayed
your mewls and chweek chweek
are incessant
you’re scarcely still
flap flap perch flap flap
you invader
you drove out the weaker
your obnoxious brightness
streaming against the grey weather
Where can you go
other than the trees nearby
after you found yourself
in unfamiliar terrain
you cannot roll back
to the moment of
the capturing hand
in that other land
you settle and multiply
your pattern unchanged
being lustrous being avian
You’re noisy because
you like gatherings
all squawking together
morning and dusk
when you feed
midday saved for
preening and loafing
nights for some quiet
breaking out at dawn
how well you’ve adapted
to being non-tropical.
Chaining the Ecstatic
As the white light on this summer’s day
is pulled back into the molten sky
white flowers begin to gleam
fresh against green hedges
in the slowpouring darkness.
White flowers gleam
while the garden’s other beauties
the scalding pinks
recede with the last of the light
dissolving into stems, pots, fences.
So heaven this is where I find you
laying your silk sheet on me
while I stand still in June
inhaling the white bouquet of life.