MOTHER NATURE

Illustration by Michael Fishel

The personification of Nature, as Mother Nature, seemed an excellent theme for a children’s poem, so here is my impression of how she might be.

MOTHER NATURE

Mother Nature’s in her garden,
Weaving wings of butterflies,
Spinning threads of shining gossamer
From memories and sighs.

In her lap is sparkling stardust,
In her lap are sunbeams bright,
In her lap are moonlit crescents,
Radiating milky light.

In her hair are woven rainbows,
Mauve and lemon, blue and lime,
In her face is love and kindness,
In her eyes is endless Time.

She will change as she is noticed,
No-one ever sees the same.
They see only what their hearts do,
What they see no-one can name.

She lives in her favourite garden,
Maybe yours, or maybe mine.
It need not be royal or regal,
Where rare blossoms intertwine.

It could be a lowly backyard,
Only daisies growing there.
But if honest people love it,
Mother Nature will be there.

For her garden is where goodness
Lives in sympathetic minds
Filled with tenderness and kindness.
Yes, it’s here where you will find

Mother Nature – in her garden,
Weaving wings of butterflies,
Spinning threads of shining gossamer,
From memories and sighs.

THE FLYING SAUCER

'UFO' (Peter Turosq)

When I was younger, my grandmother, Mrs Gertrude Timmins, told me of how, one evening many years earlier, she and other members of her family had stood in her bedroom watching three brightly-coloured UFOs circling back and forth for quite a while in the skies over their home in Wednesbury, West Midlands, before eventually flying away, never to return. Not having seen a UFO myself, I had to content myself by imagining how it might be if I ever did do so.

THE FLYING SAUCER

Through the night-time’s spangled valleys
My enquiring eyes raced far,
Still enchanted by the beauty
Of each twinkling evening star,

When a hazy gleam surged outwards
From a chasm deep in Space.
And its eldritch light grew brighter,
Darting swiftly ‘cross my face –

Like a stream of glowing fingers
Chasing softly through my hair
In a multicoloured spectrum
‘Mid the evening’s breathless air.

Then the gleam became a halo
Spinning slowly through the sky,
As the moon cast ghostly shadows,
Sinking ever down to die.

Soon a shape became apparent
In this strange, unearthly glow.
Now a humming sphere, it circled,
As its light began to grow,

In a luminous suffusion,
Till, when slowly gliding by,
I could feel its eerie presence
Probing deeply through my eyes.

And I sensed at once that, there, some
Strange intelligence looked down,
One that watched with eyes unblinking
O’er the sombre, sleeping town.

Then the phosphorescent globule
Glided silently away,
In a cosmic orb of aura
Through the heavens draped in grey,

Till its weird, fluorescent image
Faded slowly from my sight.
And my eyes were left to wander
Through the shadows of the night.

But that alien aurora
Still cast shivers o’er my face,
As I gazed in spellbound wonder
Through the catacombs of Space,

In the fear that one dark night it
Will return amid the gloom,
Like a strange, unearthly phantom
From the abysses of Doom.