~

a hexagonal green gazebo 

with transparent gauze walls

neither tent nor fortress,

firmly tethered on the lawn 

a newly landed spacecraft

has captured my granddaughter, 

it has been decided, we are 

to sleep out under the stars

no rain forecast and little wind,

a sleepover with Papa 

in the wild, one night only, 

albeit on well-inflated mattresses,

a quiet clear night, occasionally 

thin clouds seem to skip past

my supine vision,

at 2am low in the east

Jupiter, resting on a neighbour’s roof, 

makes his escape 

climbing higher in the blue black,

I listen to her light breathing

we’d held hands as she drifted off

around midnight 

all her night fears conquered, 

 I would have liked to have 

followed Jupiter’s path for longer 

but a metal woodpecker 

fastened to the cherry

obscures my view,

 now and then

the lank gauze material 

billows feebly resembling

an apologetic farewell wave 

that briefly catches my attention

a little mysterious all the same

on such a still warm night

*

© Graham R Sherwood 08/23   

~

another player takes his final bow

and quietly leaves the stage to darkness

just one more star burnt out, cold

our skies dimmer for the passing

alumni, too, some long gone, 

line up beside as ghosts 

to bid adieu or offer welcome 

to their particular heaven

a firmament richly mused

in mirth, drama, saga, song, thus, 

we consider our shrinking world, 

those we’ve lifetime loved

now conferred to history’s page

we ourselves shuffle nearer

to our epilogues, one final line

our soliloquy done

*

© Graham R Sherwood 08/23

~

an eyes-wide immensity

humble manoeuvring

white shapeless continents 

drifting gracefully peacefully

high across the panorama,

here rush-hour growls

a raucous heartbeat 

of complex misguided humanity

there is blue, 

languorous, serene

here is grey earnest, 

mechanical harsh,

I want to be there, 

I want to a serene 

ghost-like vapour 

breathing gently down

upon the machinations of man

to breathe a whisper

a long exhale to slow 

to pause the pointless vigour

*

© Graham R Sherwood 08/23

~

everything is polar dark and cold

wherever my gaze settles, 

my brio is shredded, 

I am that lonely soul 

on the night bus, desperately

clutching return tickets 

from elation to despair, 

being wordless, like falling 

in and out of love, fearing

there’ll never be another,

emotionally tumbling

from pinnacle to cynical,

so, I peer into the black

where all life’s colour flashes 

past before turning monochrome, 

slowing to a trudge,

resignedly I feel all is lost

it’s no use, and then 

something catches my eye

*

© Graham R Sherwood 08/23

~

her, two doors down

is having a sale 

stuff all over the drive

she’s already peeved,

her only child, a boy, 

now lives away, works up north

conveniently leaving

his adolescence behind

for her to clear out, 

christ alone knows where 

a doll’s house came from,

it started me thinking 

of the back bedroom

I grandly call ‘the office’

from when I had a real job,

long before people started 

the ‘work from home’ caper 

and it not meaning

just throwing a sickie,

I do a swift scan realising

how much stuff isn’t mine

and what if anything

might be worth a bob or two,

what two things I’d carry

out in a fire, easy

the Martin and the Hardy,

I stroll down two doors

and chat to Mary,

ask her if she’s sad

to see all this go,

she says no rather too quickly,

then tenderly strokes 

the doll’s house musing

‘this was mine,

I was never lucky enough

to have had a little girl’.

*

© Graham R Sherwood 08/23

~

a sky full of false promise

bears down like a bully

threatening a turbulent

morning walk beside the stream

now returned to its shallow glass

after yesterday’s storm spate,

 Bella disturbs an egret from reeds

which lifts away discontentedly

yellow boots hanging below

its snow white plumage,

 holiday jet highways form

tight vapour trails that 

bloat into huge serpents

before dissipating vaguely

as new ones take their place,

 occasionally I am forced to tiptoe

through the new urban litter of

abandoned electric scooters

purportedly saving my planet

making my neighborhood

easier to breathe in,

 I look to the heavens

and see myriad false promises

cynically arranged in committee

gloating at my curses

*

© Graham R Sherwood 08/23

~

my youngest, herself now

married and a mother

asked me when 

and how I knew, 

an impossible enquiry,

love, that undecipherable entity

a peculiarly complex viral affliction 

for which there is no antidote,

I succumbed at only seventeen

and have lived for over 

half a century within its tenancy,

perhaps a chance meeting, 

a snapshot from a bus window

a photograph in a newspaper

who will ever know?

the ‘when’, was on first sight

a warm enduring ache,

the ‘how’, harder to fathom

remains an enduring enigma

*

© Graham R Sherwood 07/23

~

all through that Summer

questions, questions, 

were you my guardian angel

or my demon devil?

was I your Noah’s dove?

now distant memories 

mysteriously weave their way back 

through the mist, like the blind 

ferryman who reads the tides and

 navigates a route through 

the perilous reef,

memories that swirl around my legs,

like old newspaper, their

sharp words pierce my ears, 

and cling to my shoulders

as I try in vain to shrug them off,

but they cannot harm me

I have waited here too long,

secretly seething outwardly sanguine

and for the briefest moment 

you recoil, before once again

 goading me with your lion-tamer’s

 whip, before placing your lovely head

between my chastised jaws,

all around leaves fall 

a point of no return reached

from proud green

to humbled bronze.

*

© Graham R Sherwood 07/23 (rev)

~

the morning is coming up and

gradually like am-dram footlights

pale streaks begin to bleed

dimly through the flowering cherry,

it’s 4am and across two gardens

next door’s cinema screen sized

television still flickers through a film

looks like he’s gone to sleep in the chair again,

why I’m sitting at the kitchen table

like a condemned man, only a mug of tea 

and a blank page for company

heaven only knows,

I can’t even blame the pigeons, 

all of which are hunkered down 

out of this mean inconsistent wind,

I had woken up from a dream 

about Rugby (town not game) 

the people, old colleagues and neighbours

we’ve not seen for forty years, and was

wondering if they ever thought of us

who emigrated south,

not being a smoker, rather strangely I

warmly remember the triangular tobacco shop 

perched at the confluence of two narrow streets,

and the children’s favourite the cattle market, 

both now long gone,

we discovered our son’s colour blindness

in the park there, evidently baked beans 

were the same colour as its green bandstand,

it was our first house

we were very happy there

*

© Graham R Sherwood 07/23

~

Saturn looked so close last night

unusually to the left 

and lower than the moon,

as if sitting on Seamus’s roof,

at 3am it made me think, that

when the end comes and all 

chance of animal and human 

life is extinguished,

whether by cataclysmic event

or our own infantile foolishness,

three things will remain for

future exploratory

extra-terrestrial pioneers

to consider, 

Termites, Marmite and Lego, 

the three building blocks for 

a new civilization

*

© Graham R Sherwood 07/23