Is it these uncertain times
or something handed down,
innate or learned,
this urge to grow things?
To seed, plant, water, weed,
believe that loved enough
anything is possible.

This is a reworking of a previous poem

Once a day 
we walk green lanes and
where the path narrow
swerve into harrowed fields,
like cars on icy roads
keeping our distance,
avoiding collisions.

In lockdown, 
I am on my knees
weeding again.
Today’s interlopers:
Sow Thistle, 
Creeping Jenny, 
Bittercress,
Creeping Buttercup.
Wild flowers with names
like death-metal bands.

A solitary bee has 
marked this spot
for three days now.
At 2 in the afternoon
alternately hovering 
through 90 degrees, 
North, then East, 
then North again.
She stays about an hour.
What is she doing?
Memorising flowers?
Practicing navigation?
Aligning with the hive?
Is she dancing?

I can write about this now,
now that they have gone,
about the things I found
behind the water tank.
I had never seen women
like this before, held down in
stapled photographs,
men on their knees, everyone
smiling or laughing or crying.
Some sort of game?
I never said a word, and
knew, somehow, that
these were secret things
about which no-one spoke,
and felt a kind of shame. 

This wind from the sea
is angry, angry enough
to tear tin from barns.

The borrowed days are here.
In small monasteries 
we are learning fast
to unworship things.


Our devotions are simple:
walk outside once a day,
tend your gardens, stay well, 
reduce your wants. Share.


Our scripture is written
simply, on seed packets,
in reread books, love letters.
We are writing new poetry.

The cat on the bed 
sleeps curled and purrs, lost in dreams
of leaping bird kill
 

I remember what I saw when I was young, 
five, going on six, sat in the back 
of a Ford Anglia, skating 
through Coventry in wintertime.
Twenty years since the war,
and still whole streets in ruins.
Or was it slum clearance, 
making way for decent homes, 
bulldozers and cranes in full swing,
my parents, stiff-backed in front,
working hard to put things right?

Once my father started, 
he couldn’t stop.
Maybe he didn’t know how,
or needed to be someone else.
His tales contained a grain 
of truth, often less. 
In one day he:
joined the Tijuana Brass,
found gold, sang in a skiffle band,
won a Scandinavian knife fight, 
and loved, like a father, 
an old sea captain
called swivel-eyed Lloyd.
I never knew whether to laugh
or cry.