poetry

In The Foreground And Beyond – A Photograph

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An overflowing bin blazoned
with a colourful advert,

an up turned ice cream cone
on a clipped lawn,

slabs of concrete paving,

a cast iron fence with shrubs
overflowing and intertwined,

a vine creeping over and on,

bushes expanding,

a row of mature Scots pine
red against the skyline,

the brooding clouds, plump
and heavy eyed, sullen
with imminent rain,

fleeting blue between, high
and shifting.

A gull rides the buffeting
and for a moment glows white as
gold with the touch of the five o’clock
sun gilding is wing tips

then drops away, plummets to
nothing

leaves only
a cold burnt image
indelible on the retinal sky

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

WordPress And My Mind

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Each time I Press
I take a step
And reach out
Far in to the mists

Of the unknown.
For Me it feels
As though the cutting edge
Of art arrives

And happens now
As I reach
In to the mists of mind
And bring back

All that I find there.
And then I Press again,
And wait.
And just like the mind

Beautiful things emerge,
Personalities materialise,
Worlds unfold,
And I realise

The myriad forms
The myriad souls
The myriad stars,
A billion hidden constellations

Out there,
Awaiting discovery.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

The Dream Of Her Self

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She finds the dream
On spring days, in old villages,
In gardens and in flowers.
Something happens
As if reacting to the sun
For she shines like yellow petals
And smiles, her face upturned
And her eyes closed.
She absorbs
And then offers back her radiance.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

Words Come (for blog – On The Heath – I Of July)

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Words come
Definite in the press of his pen

As if his ball point
Calls the very thing

To its truth
And written absolute

And carves a living thing
Upon the mind’s white page,

Then frees it
From the words’ vehicle

So the image
Stands real and proud

And wordlessly
Three dimensional.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

I Have Seen Your Face Before

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I have seen your face before,
over plump and pumped in places
with fillers glossy and wishfully
young: meant to forget every mark
and memory of the life preceding,
meant to fight the foe of time.

Worn by so many women, fifty
something and reaching for youth’s
fashionably bland facsimile, whose
disappointing truth is mask as lifeless
as any purchased latex version of the
self: a faces see-through window
made so clumsily
in to a tinted wall.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

Risen Early

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Risen early with spring dawn;
Light is at the perfect golden angle
And the air is newly formed.

Footsteps on the cool, dew touched
Lawn and ears filled with bird chatter
And twittering: a wood pigeon cooing
With sweetening purr.

Where the sun has made a glade
Among buddlia foliage a hover fly
Alights a leaf and basks for a delicate
Moment: then again to the
Shimmering air.

God is near
Not in the far flung heavens.

© 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.

She’s Hot

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She’s hot:
So hot she’s taken to shrinking
Behind dark glasses to avoid the
Harsh glare her reflection causes:
She wears her hair as a glossy veil.

In the beginning she sunned herself
In boys clumsy praises, and young
Mens’ too, but then came the daily
Recognition of all men; the staring,
The hungry eyes seeing her beautiful
Status and wanting some of that
Improving brightness to burnish
Themselves, like a ointment of
Loveliness applied to their skin.

And so now she hunkers down
Between her shoulders, shades
Herself in the arms of a celebrity,
Seeks out their star-touched kind,
For her lovely face has made her
Kin to them.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.

The Very First Beginning

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I’ve been living in the cave of winter
and only knew it fully when spring’s
pulse flushed first in snowdrops and
buds bulging on the stems.

I’m awakened to the ground rush,
natures upsurge and levity behind
each tender shoot: the whole earth
intent to leaf and reclined to the
photon sun, its matter poured
eternally.

Like this my new garden arrives to my
eyes: a new flower gift each day, the
unexpected brought on spring wave
as herbaceous kind are called and
charmed, powerless on the tendril
energy.

With the scent of first flowers and
the colour of first butterflies, and first
bumble bees quick on the first sun
blasts, I realise the spring and wake
once more, as creatures wake from
their hibernation. All of us drawn from
the darkness to the light, new
warmness, the air crisp and perfect
as the very first beginning.

© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.