Poetry

All poems © Ross Gardner and should not be reproduced in any format without prior permission.

An opportunity for some poems to see their first light of day.  I hope they are enjoyed.

 

Three Devon River Sketches

I – All Things in Good Time

What's the stronger, stone or water?

Stone of course!

Only it's not,

Well, sort of, it's not.

The old feathers and bricks

But in a geological span,

And more subtle.

Indescribably subtle.

Incomprehensibly subtle.

Superlatives extending, but each still describing

The same short, counter-intuitive truth –

All things in good time.

II – River

Meat and drink for the would-be poet

And 'do-it-yourself' philosopher.

Images etched onto the retina,

Then smoothed clean without a trace.

Breathed in with a smell you can taste.

A swirling soundscape absorbed through the ears

And then...... and then......

A lifetime of flat-pack furniture

And tee-total vegetarianism

III – River Walk

To walk

   along a

     river

  is to     find

       fragments

             gathered

         and      reconsigned,

           haphazard

               in immaculate

             chaos.

A Broad View

Marshland, reed-swamp, sedge fen and carr –

Old memories realigned.

That wind among thickets,

Through the mud's ooze and endless seep.

Uttered with voices wrung from the gullet,

Or hauled into plain sight, diminishing.

Skulks the eel-woven shallows

With perfected fixation and a throatful of reeds.

And realised, perhaps, in a magnesium flash,

Searing the memory.

Small mysteries threading the eye

And the layers set down, redeemed and redefined.