Welcome back, thank you for joining me again.    I hope we can take a few minutes to rest here.

I’m sharing another of my lockdown poems – simple, largely as they appear from my pencil – in the hope you’ll find some companionship, something that helps.  This one begins not in the garden, with light and green, but in the middle of the night.

Waking at night, or disturbed by dreams, thoughts race away.  If I remember to catch myself, I try to pause, to breathe, to notice.  Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to hear something wonderful, which breaks through the patterns of thoughts.
It’s been owls for me, lately. The night has its consolations.

Owls – lockdown poems 2

Three nights now,
I have heard a pair of owls
in the garden.

 
Startled awake, suddenly,
by a fragment of
remembered news,
of fear,
and then, suddenly,
there they are –
the owls, calling
to each other, and,
it seems, to me.

Now, morning, and I look
up at the solemn black windows
of the barn, great eyes,
one shiny with a film of sky,
one matt and sightless.
I am glad we did not fix that glass.

There is room for an owl’s drawn in wings,
room to fly into that attic darkness,
where the peacock butterflies blink
their wings awake after the winter,
room to fill that desolate space
with life. May it be so. May it be so.