rewrite | journalread

25/01/2023
by Polly 2 Comments

Love Bites

I had to be an optimist
happy through and through
to perpetually smile
and swing along with you
what times we had
good times, laughter bright, loud, new
remnant embers shone
with sultry amber hue.

Remember the embers
the soft and sultry glow?
You’ll crunch along life’s ashy path
mind how the cinders blow
they’ll cut your eyes and make them bleed
for love has teeth that bite
such wounds will never ever heal
there are no words to help congeal
or close those cold love bites.

Published in On the Words of Love (Brian Wrixton & Poets with Voices Strong, 2012)

Girls Got Rhythm (Black Pear Press, 2016)

Rewritten 2023

14/07/2021
by Polly Leave a comment

Smoking Bastille

Alain Bashung, a famous French singer, was such a fan of Gauloises Disque Bleu, it is said he refused to quit even during his chemotherapy. This poem was written for Bastille Day, 14^th July—the day that gives the perfect excuse to eat much cheese or smoke yourself silly (if that’s your bag). It’s been updated this year.

Smoking Bastille

Voltaire could neither put up nor shut up, 
he famously said, ‘Let us read…let us dance…’ 
François-Marie Arouet,
imprisoned twice in the Bastille, 
his delight at the fall 
of the smoking Bastille 
would have seen major celebrations,
had he been around for the smoke.

Fast forward to:
Gauloises Disque Bleu, 
elegant, cool, 
(show-off) smoking.

Gauloises Disque Bleu. 
Cough your way through them
prisoners of nicotine, 
echo Voltaire
 in the Bastille, 
Bruce Willis in Die Hard,
neither put up nor shut up;
Bashung, so hooked that
chemotherapy was enjoyed 
smoking Gauloises Disque Bleu.

24/02/2021
by Polly Leave a comment

A Flower Growing in the Wrong Place

A soothing blue cumulus of cranesbill clusters beneath laurel, the petals grey veined, stretching for sky under a leaf green canopy. Pecking flowers clamber up tangled with a sweet clingy weed, you know the one, with sticky burrs later in the year. There’s an empty bed with last year’s faded, crumbling woodchips; the scent lingers still. Look again, the bed is not so empty—a crumpled weed control membrane lurks partly hidden by compost, held down by terracotta bricks butted up to decking. Silverly shining, a meshed pit shows off yellow ragwort; a flower growing in the wrong place addresses the buzz and clatter of a chainsaw in the park.