Lights Of March

 

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Softly treads March
Upon the sun-warmed earth:
A new green pallet
Strewn in daplings
Beneath trees
Still winter shod
But bearing
Blue sky and bud.
And Beneath:
A brief trumpeting
Of yellowness
Before the sky shades
With a canopy of leaf.

©Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2017

Cherry Blossom

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A day or two at most
In this floriferous moment,
Where white is defined
In garlands
And upon the breeze
And strewn upon the green.

The garden in pale fresh notes,
Hardly even a thing
Before altered
And borne away
Upon the wind filled clouds
Searching in the blueness.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

The Celebrity Face

The fear of movement
Steers the knife
And stills the flesh
In to a mask,
Free of wrinkles
And evidence
Of time past
And existence happening.

As if the demanding child
Were given
Its every shouted wish,
To go against
Life’s natural ageing path
And join
The Yes-Men horde
Branding the tampered
And augmented look
As the ‘must be’
– New beautiful –
For every old
Who holds too tight
To that which
Has long since departed.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

Robinson Crusoe

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Palms swoop to blue utopia
And sands are refined powders
For the wave washed feet.
And sea water is full spectrum
Aqua marine, visiting every
Denomination between
Palest lagoon and deep oceanic.
And the fish are straight from Eden,
As is each paradise bird,
Paint pallet dipped to definition
By God’s own artful hand.

And from a spring, among rocks,
In the shade of ancient trees,
Sweet water froths and gurgles
To a pool in which a man
Might wash his skin
Of all the sins his choices
Have brought and indelibly marked,
And rise anew,
His face clean, his mind refreshed
As the unlearned infant child
Comes naked and without a thing
In to the clutches of this island world.

 

Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice

Authenticity

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With a face from the front cover of the National Geographic the old man carries the burden of paddy baskets with entrepreneurial spirit, balancing his load for each photographer and grinning with a toothy and well practised smile. More than anyone else, he knows the value of authenticity and clucks eagerly for the next shutter click to capture his own in the stillness of film.

 

copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice

Old Boat

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Half a boat
Long ago dragged
To moulder on the tide line,
Relaxes in splinters
Shed like bark.

One day
They’ll be but bevelled plank
Jutting from the sand
And a fibrous thought
Left in the memory

Or perhaps
Another wreck
Lent sideways
And slack upon its keel,
Fading in the inevitable time.

 

Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice