She Found The Morning Waiting

She found the morning waiting for her when she awoke. From the way the sunlight spilled around the edges of the ill-fitting curtains in the bedroom, it seemed to be quite late; it could even have been around midday.

By habit, she turned to look for the clock on her bedside table. This was not her bedroom, though, and there was no clock there. The quilt had slipped off her in the night. She had a vague half-dream memory of the heat of the night and hot, sweaty dreams that had twisted her about on the bed until her fingers had bought her enough relief for her to slip away into sleep.

The air was pleasantly cool on her skin as she rose out of the bed and headed off towards the bathroom.

She came back into the bedroom about half an hour later, her long black hair wrapped up in a towel. Another large towel was draped loosely over her shoulders and she dried parts of herself absently with a corner of the towel as she strolled over to the window and pulled back the curtains.

The sun was up high in the sky, well above the tops of the trees in the small wood that merged into the cottage’s garden. She could hear birdsong from the wood. She did not know enough about birds to recognise their songs, only that there seemed to be several different songs competing with each other.

Where she had grown up and lived – deep in the heart of big cities – the only bird noise that she had ever really noticed was the sound of pigeons coughing in the traffic fumes on her high window ledges. 

Monday Poem: Breathe a Name

Breathe a Name

The world becomes familiar
an inventory of possibilities
hovers near your open lips.

You take each delicate moment
into cupped hands to breathe
a name over what you can hold.

Just one word and all this
becomes real enough
for you to walk through.

As if this is the only world
and the rest are mere dreams
made for lonely nights.

Forests and Pages

All those years fall back between us like chapters in a book, like trees in a dense forest, so far back now I can hardly even remember those paths I took which got me here, lost and alone.

I can hear your voice calling out to me across the years, from that long lost part of the woods, back when our stories had hardly begun. Could we have stayed on that path together, would we now be singing different songs to protect us against these dark nights we spend under the thick over-arching canopy that hides so many of the guiding stars from us?

Still, I am here, and you are so far out of reach. Perhaps we should go on, carry on down our separate paths, perhaps one day, not too far away, we will chose paths that bring us closer together.

Or maybe we will take diverging paths, once again, which mean I cannot even hear the fading echoes of your song of lost loneliness, as another chapter or two of our separate stories grow us apart, and this forest thickens between us. 

Friday Poem: A Flame into Being

A Flame into Being

A languid sigh and the luxury of motion
as you rise up from stillness and silence
shrugging off your redundant clothes
all at once, like a cat
washes off winter by a warming fire.

Your eyes are raked back into flame
by the touch of air on your waiting skin.
Flesh comes alive feeling the heat
of a real need ember into flame.
And you are eager now, to live again.

Waiting For The Future

Now is the time for hesitance to end. Still we wait, though, as if unsure of what shape our worlds will take from this moment onwards. We are on the verge of something new for both of us, a moment that could turn both our lives from their current paths, twisting us off down some new unexplored road together. We both know it could be a dead end, that it could all end suddenly around that first bend where the future lies hidden. It could be a ancient heavy tree trunk fallen across the path, a few steps past that unknown turning, or it could lead out into that valley of all that we ever promised ourselves and had, now, resigned ourselves to seeing only in dreams of what might have been.

The weight of all our possible futures hangs over this moment, where we stand poised on the edge of what could always be a mistake, or that one moment that turns that corner in both our lives. It could even just turn out to be nothing more than a memory of a moment that might have been, leaving only a fond smile of regret. It could just be another one of those events that leaves no consequence, beyond a few ripples over the surface of the river of our lives as they make their way down to the endless sea.

We do not know, so we wait here on the verge of the moment waiting for the future to decide itself for us. 

A Distant Morning

Sometimes it seems as though the day will never begin. The night holds on, clutching its blankets close to itself, covering up the sky and not letting the dawn take hold of the horizon and drag the day up from where it waits, ready to begin.

You wait for the day, not with expectation or dread, just wishing the night was over, and that time can begin again. The clock waits for an eternity between each second, letting whole ages pass before bestowing another minute upon you. Hours take too long to measure. Yesterday was more than a lifetime ago.

There were times, which seem such a long time ago now, when the night held promises for you, when – indeed – midnight could have been the magical witching hour. A time when you danced through the darkness and strode down those dangerous streets safe in the knowledge that you were young and immortal and the night belonged to you, full of meetings and the possibility of someone’s warm flesh against yours as you ignored the irrelevant dawn.

Now, though, those times are long ago, sometimes even to far for memory to reach, they seem no more substantial than the strange dream that dragged you out of sleep and left you here on the shore of morning waiting for the tide of daybreak to wash you into motion. 

Here Stands Solitude

Here stands solitude, high on the headland, the wind blowing back her hair, tangling it across her face. Her hands though, remain in the pockets of her coat. She does not reach up to stroke the hair away from her face with either impatience or resignation. She just stares out over the sea towards the horizon.

She sees without looking, watches without seeing. What she searches for is not out there riding those rough white capped waves home to her. The passing she mourns was not lost at sea. He walked out of her door and drove away back inland and away from here.

She does not, not now, even regret his going. She has found within her solitude something she did not realise she lacked until one morning, back in the summer that seemed a lifetime ago, she climbed up here, the highest point for miles around, to just stare out at the sea.

Eventually, as though the sea has answered her unspoken question, she nods towards the sea as though taking her leave of a friend and turns to walk down the slippery path back down to the cottage that sits alone, halfway up this hillside.

She glances down at the rest of the village that sits like a collection of bright stones in the cupped hand of the bay and smiles to herself, a smile like that of one coming home from a long journey.