A CALL FROM MY PAST

Some of the happiest days of my childhood were spent strolling through the fields and forests near my home. Today, many of those beautiful retreats are gone, paved over and lost beneath the ever-encroaching shadow of urban settlement, but I see them still in my mind’s eye, and there is no doubt that part of my essence lingers on in those green and pleasant lands of my youth.

A CALL FROM MY PAST

Back to the countryside’s
Still morning air,
Where grass softly sways, for
My heart remains there.

Small singing birds perching
On leaf-covered trees,
The sun shining down on
Small yellow-striped bees

That gather sweet nectar
From every wild flower.
Magnificent Nature,
For this is her hour.

The field-mice in cornfields,
The swans on the lakes –
All Nature’s perfections,
Not man-made mistakes.

And as I gaze fondly
On all that I see,
A child’s voice sounds softly,
It’s calling to me –

The voice of my childhood,
The laugh of a child
Who listened, and followed,
The call of the wild.

THE FLY

Although much of my poetry is of the rhyming variety, I have ventured from time to time into the less constrained world of prose, as with this composition.

THE FLY

A vibrant whirring of wings filled the room, and I gazed up to see a large, bewildered fly whirling wildly round and round in dizzy, eccentric circles, periodically crashing into the deceptively transparent freedom of the windows, only to buzz around once more in unceasing, dazed convolutions.

“Kill it!” I thought, spearing it with dark, forbidding eyes like chilling sabres of death, as it spiralled above like a demented spirit drawn ever downward to damnation, pausing momentarily to wring its suckered appendages in expressionless despair.

But as my arm rose like a shadowed scythe of fear, the hopelessness of its plight enveloped me, and I sat back as if I were a lonely silhouette bowing before the inevitability of Fate, for I was stricken by the similarity of our twin existences.

Why, are we not from parallel worlds? You – from an outward macroworld, while I grope ever through an inward microworld. For I too am continually searching for the knowledge of my own fate, chasing alone through the endless channels and lonely corridors of my own mind, seemingly devoid of hope beneath such curtains of gloom, searching for that which eludes me, passing through empty chambers of nothingness

This is my unknown, this is my Eternity – an eternity of hopeless dreams of fulfilment. A door lies open, a mirror lies within, and from its glass-illuminated interior a colourful circus clown gazes out. But the clown is weeping, for I myself am peering into the mirror – a mirror reflecting only my innermost feelings and beliefs.

And as I look, eyes bear down upon me, and faces appear. The world is watching, and waiting. People are murmuring, and raucous laughter surrounds me. Where am I to go? Only Fate can tell me. Yet I am unable to ask.

And so the world continues, the people turn away, finding some other source of amusement, while I am left to chase ever on through the phantoms of my own melancholia.

Thus my sympathy, little fly, is yours – we are both lost in alien worlds. Mine is of my own making, mine to endure. But yours may be replaced by your natural realm via my intervention, for yours I see through inward-reflecting mirrors, though you can never hope to see mine through your myriad-faceted orbs. Mine is yours inversely, and where they meet, there one day someone shall find the ultimate Truth.

So leave now, and forget the unforgettable. Why should we both suffer? Why should one stranger die by the hand of another?

I slowly arose again, almost as if I were a vast statue awakened from a deep sleep of petrification, and moved forward.

I raised my hand like a crescendo of silver trumpets, I opened the window and let the fly go.

THE PRAYING MANTIS

Despite its small size, the praying mantis never fails to elicit within me a momentary thrill of icy shock and fear whenever I see one of these extraordinary, alienesque insects, with its mesmerising gaze and lethal pseudo-pious stance – all of which I have sought to encapsulate in the following poem.

THE PRAYING MANTIS

There it squats – Death’s fearful gargoyle –
Like a monster cast from Space;
Eyes unblinking stare in silence
From its strange, hypnotic face
Like a pair of shining gemstones –
Glinting facets, cold but bright –
Gleaming softly ‘midst the shadows
With a pale, unearthly light.

Here it waits amongst the leaflets
In a pious, praying stance,
Yet the burning fires of Evil
In those deathless orbs still dance
As this prayerful gorgon crouches
In an alien repose,
And its eyes, ne’er closing, flicker,
Each a fiery, blood-tipped rose.

Hush! A movement flutters downwards –
There, a small, unwary fly,
Flitting closer, ne’er perceiving
How it all too soon will die.
For within a second’s lifetime,
Moving faster e’en than Thought,
Flick-knived forelegs take it captive;
And the battle has been fought.

Soon it waits again, unnoticed,
‘Midst the shadows of the trees,
With intelligence so chilling
That the very sun would freeze
If this ghoul e’er gazed upon it
In the glory of the skies.
None but Death may find a shelter
In those cold, unblinking eyes.