When the spirit came, 

to watch over my journey, 

I was dumbstruck

knowing neither the route

I should take

nor duration of the path,

whether it be a physical challenge

or emotional adventure.

Can one become a pilgrim,

if one embarks on a raft

with no particular destination in mind?

Adrift, at the mercy of life’s

currents and tides,

ignorant of whether

my denouement 

will be a friendly beach

or devastating rocky cliffs.

*

© Graham Sherwood 01/2020

A new day, an old face,

five hundred words

in the Telegraph, perhaps

sixty seconds on the News at Ten

or Radio 4,

five minutes reminiscing

perhaps dig the book out

or play a favourite track,

another one gone

so we sit reverentially 

to consider our own.

*

© Graham Sherwood 01/2020

We felt we were at the end of the earth

Hobart, clear water to Antarctica, 

standing on the slate grey dock, in pale grey fog

shivering alongside the abandoned

bronze huskies and explorer’s paraphernalia 

sculpted and left as witness

to the brave who went out before

a curious ensemble on the frozen cobbles

having missed the boat south.

Tasmania, ‘The Natural State’ they say here

where the four seasons gamble daily

for pride of place.

*

© Graham Sherwood 01/2020

It’s a ritual

on arriving back from any journey

we look at each other and say 

‘home and safe’,

it is a given that we both understand.

For some, home isn’t always a safe place,

those who experienced the blitz,

refugees from war-torn countries,

recipients of domestic violence

those with anti-social violent neighbours.

Home should be a castle,

indomitable warm, hospitable, familiar,

a place to release a sigh,

a belly-laugh, a cry,

share food with family and friends

a place for births and inevitably deaths.

Home aren’t made of stone, bricks or wood

they’re made from hearts.

*

© Graham Sherwood 01/2020

Nothing happened/moved me

a clock struck, a door slammed

and with the stupefying brilliance

of a super-nova

a new decade of optimism slapped my face

and welcomed me to the dance.

I wore a technicolour/psychedelic shirt

a hippie hat and shades,

tried to look cool, remember my youth

but the photographs couldn’t lie,

I didn’t look that way in ‘69

so why now fifty years on?

A blink ago in 1999, 

on the threshold of the third millennium, 

dates would start with a two not a one

computers would crash, planes too, 

tonight, twenty years on, there’s nothing

we blew it!

just half the world burning, the other half drowning.

*

© Graham Sherwood 01/2020

A grey veiled morning humour 

hangs about this New Year’s Day,

an unrehearsed pantomime 

we walk through,

clipped wet hedgerows, 

red berries all broke,

squashed, scattered,

lost amongst the uncut verge,

the dogshit and the broken glass,

three children scat down muddy slopes,

soddened wild clematis beards 

droop across our footpath 

offering spit washes to us bleary revellers 

as we stumble home,

in last night’s clothes.

*

© Graham Sherwood 01/2008 and 01/2020

Saturday mornings

mother at the hairdressers

push the furniture back

play wrestle with my father

clean the horse brass

while he does the hoovering

before she comes back

chips for dinner

then dad down the bookies

chalking not betting

me watching Town down the rec

come home plastered

me not my dad

he isn’t a drinker

even though we live opposite pub

sisters out on the trot

me, head in a book

early night if it’s fishing Sunday

*

© Graham Sherwood 12/2019

Savage and sensual,

the tumult of this circling wind

high on the Col

howling like an Apache,

trying to scalp my hair

with clawing rough-raw gusts.

It doesn’t want me here

to share the panoramic view

it thinks it owns,

jealously tugging and ripping

setting my head aflame.

I scrimmage intensely

against such dynamic power

a comedic leaning gait

doggedly not giving ground.

I have earned this right

to bathe in the sculpted beauty

of these velvet magenta curves

and higher still

the eroded craggy fanged Dentelles

with scruffy cack-bedraggled sheep

swept like leaves

against the dry-stones.

*

© Graham Sherwood 12/2019

my heels clack, 

washboard thimble rasps

scratching brashly

on the frost scrubbed cobbles,

later, after the snow has flown

we become mute, entranced

listening intently

to the dumbed weight of quiet

throughout the lanes,

senses are forced taught, bleached and

distilled by the biting air

that squeezes and threatens

our pinched lives,

we suffocate under this thin pallor 

of crystalline deceit

drowned hollow ghost faces

astonished, fearful.

*

© Graham Sherwood  12/2019

Step-picking carefully

through the littered garden corpses

my final coup-de-grace,

lopping, unearthing, casting out

the last of the summer loveliness, 

now vague 

rime-embalmed statues all,

dampness hangs at every turn, 

underfoot, in stinging nostrils

pervading thick warm clothing,

on each flat surface, 

brittle steel reflections on riven stone

shimmers in buckets not stowed upside-down

frozen droplets toboggan on window panes

the earth is wet, 

soddened, brimming full,

the fresh vapour of death, nauseous

has stolen through the cracks

festering, funereal, forlorn.

*

© Graham Sherwood 12/2019