January 2017

new notebook
an abyss yawns open
to my voice

in the awe
overspilling her eyes
our smallness

news of war
teens eye their figures
up and down

an imprint
of Hiroshima
shadows me

with age
the deepening pallor
of the moon

sultry night
my birthplace rattles
its chains

swollen night
the pre-cum of dawn
bends a leaf

as it falls
the intonation
of the night

windfallen
on manicured lawns
Sappho's ashes

no more mind
just the ebb and flow
of a sea

a cicada
clings to silence
ripening

plagued by silence
a ruru mimics the sound
of the dark night

beach-combing
a child washes away
from her death

pond ripple . . .
the one I am
no more

moonlit sea
bound to me in this ditch
of ownership

after rain too
the sea has no colour
of its own

up, down
a leaf adrift
or not

midnight hunt . . .
every pulse pledged
to the prey

grave silence –
a distant fantail
barely heard

night falls on
night falling on
a dark sea

still life . . .
all my colours
from dusk

dead silence . . .
an ancestral wisdom
in so few words

still us –
sounds aflutter
enter the light

awake again . . .
has dawn recreated
the am I was?

am I to be the words no more

open hand . . .
her call curls out from
the unheard

advent silence
speaking our language

my heartbeat
on mesolithic time
once more

heaven-sent . . .
vernix enfolds the word
whispered in doubt

midsummer night
the moon hangs about
like a suicide