memory

We Were Kids

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

We set out as kids
On summer days,
Rummaging through
The undergrowth
Beneath sycamore and elder,
With mists of cow parsley
In the balance of our eyes
And swathes neck deep
On every side.
We were explores
Cutting the pungent stems
With machetes made from sticks
And the magic designed
In childhood minds,
Mapping uncharted banks
And the untended nooks
Behind garages,
Where cut grass
Disgorged from the garden’s arse
Sweated in heaps,
And old bikes
Were colonised
By wild grass
That rustled as we pushed by
On days that ranged so broad
We couldn’t perceive their endings.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2016

Old Boat

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image

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

Photograph

~ distilledvoice ~ 2 Comments

image

My father used to recount
The story of a green flash
Seen at sea when the
Sun slipped below the horizon.

As I watch the sun set
I find his story on my lips,
As though the flash were imprinted
As surely as if I’d seen it myself.

Copyright 2016 Ben Truesdale & distilledvoice

The End Of The Written Word

~ distilledvoice ~ 1 Comment

If voice
Were sky blue,
Without a word
To clutter the music,
Poetry would find
Its end
In ink’s redundancy,
The written word
Consigned
To beyond memory’s
Grasping hand.
Voice
Would become movement
Of soul through energy
And energy intern
Through the body of the man.
And happening
Would happen only in the instant
And not either side of now.
And thus time itself
Would wink from existence
And yet stretch out
In forever’s eternal flow.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

Preserving The Catch

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Fishermen haul in their net,
Bring in the unseen dimension
While fair skinned tourists
Haul in a delightful authenticity.

The net is wriggly with silver reflex,
Scales shed as a last desperate breath
Bloodies the gills, and tourists snap
In their own reflex to capture the dying light.

It soon quells as each silver fish
Relinquishes and stills on the beach.
Fishermen tidy their nets and
Tiny fry, caught but unwanted

Dry on the sea of sand,
Embalmed in the photograph
In which tourists preserve,
Just as the fishermen salt

And lay their catch in the sun.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

So Slowly

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IMG_2257

So slowly
Yet the years pass by
And old roads
Enveloped
By the seasons fruit
And fallen leaves
Brought down
To the carpeting ground
Are each year
Millimetres closer
To the countryside,
As new formed earth,
Like age rings
Of the tree,
Mark the cycle
By their regular encroachment.

It is thus
That our histories
Are buried.
And time is immeasurable
As it flows
Sometimes slowly
And other times
Like a swift tide,
Our ancestors
Sunk in the mud
Of generations,
As the millimetres
Have built
To the platform
On which
Life now resides

And finds us alive,
Upon the skin
Of now happening
But with deep roots
Drawing and sucking
On the layered sediments
Of history
And all those
Dead ideas.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015

Aunty Jan

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I always thought my Aunty Jan was a film star.

Perhaps it was her long nails varnished to a glossy red or her lip stick and carefully applied make up.

Perhaps it was the twinkle in her eye and the prettiness she wore so easily or the way she bent down to look at we adoring children, paying us a rare and beautiful moment, a snippet of another life, a gift other worldly and mysterious.

Thirty years on
and I can’t shake the feeling that she glides on charmed, celluloid magic and lives the screen life, passing effortlessly between the real, the silver, and the flickering multicoloured.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.