SUNDAY'S LESSON
Sunday's like a miniature christmas – lonely.
Town is shut and down-and-outs like me
Not really welcome.
Pretty gals and boys are not about they're sleeping off
Last night's brute mating chase, no doubt,
Which ended probably in a draw
And everywhere the silent burn for love,
Heeded only by the motley pigeons
Who just get on with it this sullen morn.
I feed them with the crumbled crust
Of an old bun with bacon in it.
This distracts the hens.
The cocks continue courting;
Cooing and strutting, never giving up.
I should learn a lesson from this.
A LUMP OF FLUTED MARBLE
They are bringing down a city church;
One of many built with sovereigns and pence
of rich and poor, united in fervour
– a moral injection to the squalor of slums;
a brief Victorian fashion for chapels and spires,
whose bronze bells bruised the urban sky.
A century of solid stone tumbles.
I scavenge the religious rubble,
picking up a lump of fluted marble for a doorstop
and a wooden organ tube my puny lungs can't blow.
Nine months on, a health centre appears;
flat-roofed, dismal, unlikely to last thirty years.
Flights, Issue Nine, June 2023
Flight of the dragonfly 