Foyers Poems

Poem for Joanna

http://seeingnorthlight.blogspot.com/2012/09/blog-post.html

For Peachie Le Nic

http://seeingnorthlight.blogspot.com/2013/08/for-peachie-le-nic-i-leaving-that.html

At Foyers

http://seeingnorthlight.blogspot.com/2013/12/blog-post_27.html

What I Liked About Rex

http://seeingnorthlight.blogspot.com/2013/01/0-false-18-pt-18-pt-0-0-false-false.html

                               At Foyers

                                                        for Jessica

           

Donnelly sat in the kitchen at Foyers

at midnight

while an actress

home from her play

just stood at the stove

lost in thought

making herself cocoa

the household

asleep in their rooms

it was late

he was annoyed she was there

disturbing solitude

oblivious that poetry

had come to life

in front of him

just a memory now

that actress

so Donnelly’s assets increase

as his life winds down

and can shards of broken poetry

be reassembled    

made whole    containers

for meditations?

or will we know of him just these scraps?

through Google  

Donnelly searched the net for names

sometimes found

an old friend

untimely

dead

                                    © Dick Russell, 2013, 2016

      What I Liked About Rex

      He devised the airlift that fed Berlin  

      There’s now a street   Rex Waite Straße  in his honor  

      Wing Commander Reginald Waite

      What I liked about Rex was his quiet manner

      his interest in archeology

      he’d flown biplanes over Mesopotamia

      over England’s shires

      noting old pathways

      meandering routes unseen at ground level

      how such paths came together
      at places often sacred

                         places once pagan 

      but whatever culture's there

      still performs its rites

      Rex had an ease with authority about him

      as when he got me to help him

      re-install wooden shutters

      one fine late Autumn day

      shutters that winterized French windows

      opening out onto the lawn at Foyers

     where New Forest ponies sometimes grazed

      such a fine day it was

      with the breeze lifting fallen leaves

      into a momentary vortex

      as  dry leaves spiraled up into a helix

      then fell back to the patio as calm prevailed

      there were no dark clouds in the sky

      except his good Lady

      who hated onset of winter

      Foyers where ponies brought their foals

      geese pecked at fallen quince

      wood was stacked by the front door

      ready for winter fires

      was Foyers such a place where old paths met?

      it seemed actors   actresses   often stayed there

      while playing Southampton Rep

      & poets came and went

      never paying rent

      © Dick Russell, 2013, 2016

Poem for Joanna

                                 How can I tell of my silence?   with words?

a radio telescope

gaunt contraption of sheds

& very many grids of cable

imagine a telescope dish

            the diameter of the earth

imagine probing the furthest areas of the universe

            energy

            as in quasars

                        suns

& my sun

my ENERGY                        bursts

a crescendo

            is a quasar

                        a thing of legend

but quietly goes the air

mushrooms in dank places

lightened by dawn

Joanna has never heard the sonic hiss

there is a smell of breakfast

a stream leaping down stones

which among the grasses is the ancient one?

the keeper of grass legend

or among water             which drop?

Joanna

your legs are beautifully long

            but you are too big for Rodin

come at me

            I say you are too big

                        but Rodin is dead anyhow

                                    perhaps of lesser legged women

I talk thus when I am tired

or I am enigmatic

                        later I will try to find

                        heron imagery

my verse will walk on stilts

my arm on white stains black

I write my blackness with light

were I no poet

            an astronomer I'd be

& I would hunt

for quark