Magpie #128

Untitled.

It's said that much depends 

upon a red wheelbarrow

glazed with rain 

beside the white chickens.

Perhaps and perhaps not.

Chickens seek shelter

from the rain and barrows

quickly fill with water.

My own barrow (by Hamelin)

is dark blue. It sits beside the 

red one and and both of them,

the red and blue hold water now

enough to drown the chickens

and perhaps or perhaps not

myself for afters.

Posted for Mag 128, prompted by a photograph by Elena Kalis.

Last May

When we first met the larches showing pink,
hinted at May. We linked our hands. We kissed
over the garden gate. Silly? I know.

Now you are gone, the latch behind you fallen,
the larches might as well sleep under snow.      
The gate hangs lifeless on a broken hinge        
since May, last May, eternities ago.


Posted for G-Man's weekly 55 word request. Plenty more if you follow the link.              

The Willow Manor Mag No.141

Gone

I thought you'd gone. Really, I thought you'd gone.

I never dreamed you'd never not look back,
would even pass my window and not wave.
So music died, heartstrings untuned, gone slack.
I faced my mirror as it were my grave,
the heart stitched to my sleeve come quite undone.

Until the rose, the single blood-red rose,
left on my step, speckled with summer rain
and you, retreating till I called you, dropped
my defences, wept, wept and breathed again,
kissed you until this torn heart's bleeding stopped,
sutured now, comforted and in repose.


For Tess Kincaid's Mag 141 from the Willow Manor.

Leaving

I will remember how the slanted light
visited my room, and how the clock
I mended - so many years ago - measured
the flow of then through now to next
dropping each steady second in the pool
of such time as is left. They drop like stones.

Somewhere the furniture that lived with me
will still be knocking about. My chair. My desk.
The little bed I dreamed on, waited, wept,
now are all gone, to dustiness, to sales
and nothing to hold but untold memories.
A floorboard creaks, door closes, last look back,
and then the turned key, prisoning the heart.


Tess at Willow Manor offered Andrew Wyeth's picture "Big Room"
for this week's Magpie prompt.

Haiku in 'N' Dimensions

Interesting how

Kline's picture looks a bit  like

a Mobius loop  . . .

Magpie Tales#113

Tess at Willow Manor gives us Marc Chagall's 1954 picture "Red Roofs" to work from this week.

Beginnings.

   I was just about the last in my class to start.  Who would forget the date - St.Valentine's Day - in my fourteenth year, 3 days after my birthday?  I joke about that now. That first morning it didn't seem all that funny. I knew what was happening through a waking dream and the blood spots in my pyjamas and on the undersheet. Was I supposed to be overwhelmed? Surprised? Had I thought I'd somehow been excused the woman's ritual? I explored between my legs. Bloody fingertips for verification. But there was none of the discomfort my classmates complained of.  I got out of bed and stuffed a handtowel into my pyjama pants - don't ask me why - and shuffled to my bedroom window. Some girls moaned on about headaches, gripey pains, and some got uber-bitchy with everybody. So far I felt O.K., till I realized I was crying.

   There had been more snow, but it had stopped now and was thawing. On the roof of the outhouse below my bedroom window patches of red were spreading, replacing the downy snow, showing the rough, hard tiles.  

   I could hear Mum downstairs and sounds of the kitchen table being laid for breakfast and because of the state I was in I didn't want to go down, so I went to the top of the stairs and called out "Mum!  Mum?" and when she called up, "What is it  Lucy love? There's a clean blouse down here if you can't find one," I leaned on the bannister rail, not knowing what words I would use to her, knowing only that now, on this special day for lovers, my childhood was truly over.

.

Magpie Tales#105

The picture prompt from Tess reminded me of a cycling story my Dad used to tell.

It Takes Allsorts . . .

Beryl Burton (1937 - 1996) should never have straddled a bike if her doctors were to be believed. She suffered a serious attack of rheumatic fever as a young girl and was advised to avoid strenuous activity - like cycle racing. She went on to hold British records for cycle time-trials  at 10, 25, 50 and 100 miles and the 12 and 24 hour distance trials. She won World Championships on the road  and track on bikes that look quite old fashioned compared with today's aerodynamic machines costing up to £80,000!

Dad was a keen cyclist himself and would sometimes go the extra mile to see the "greats" of the era at work.  His "Beryl the Peril" story concerns the British 12 hour endurance trial of 1967, in which Beryl set a new record of 277.25 miles . . a doddle at an average speed of over 23 miles per hour. (On yer bikes, ladies and gents, and try it for one hour or even one mile!)   Near the end of the 12 hours Beryl caught and passed the leading male rider , Mike McNamara, who turned in a new mens' record of just over 276 miles in the same event. Beryl held this all-comers record for nearly two years, and today 40 years on, it is still the womens' record.

Endurance competitors would fuel themselves with dried fruit and sweets and such high energy snacks and as Beryl stormed past the flagging Mike she handed him a liquorice allsort which he acknowledged with a wave and munched as Beryl disappeared into the distance.  Dad would get quite misty-eyed telling this tale, pointing out how it exemplified the sportsmanship and cameraderie enjoyed by cycle racers in those days, adding "Of course, our Beryl was a Yorkshire lass," as if this explained everything.

The incident was commemorated in a little ceremony shown below when the Rockingham Forest Wheelers presented Beryl (by now retired) with a giant liquorice allsort.

Her story ends sadly when the Docs' advice caught up with her. She died of a heart attack, on her beloved bike, while out delivering invitations to her upcoming birthday party.