Thursday 9 April 2009

A poem in memory of a much-missed group member and friend

Disembarkation ~ Frankie Green
(for Jackey)

I return to the place
you gave me
and walk the stony shore alone.
Along the bone-bleak beach
beads fall through my fingers,
clicking like shingle under the waves
worrying at the water’s edge.
How quickly the birds vanish
over the jade sea,
and a life ebbs away on the outgoing tide. 

Like all deaths,
it takes and gives
and cannot be borne
and somehow is.

 But now here you are coming up the road on your bicycle
in a bright blue waterproof, old leather shopping bag
slung over the handlebars.
Just off up the high street to do your messages.
We’ll have a coffee then,
sit on the sea wall
reminiscing about the Red Spider Café,
talking about learning 

how presence and absence, joy
and grief, come no longer to be
two sides of the proverbial coin
but the coin itself wears as thin
as a fabric whose warp and weft combine.
The line between dissolves so
wakes and weddings, birthing and dying,
sand and rock, bone and ash,
fresh water and salt
running into each other
with life’s long alchemy
might  be one
and the same, the same.

May Homework

Homework for May, as its a Bank Holiday, we'll meet on the second Monday - at Church Hall in Argyle Road, Whitstable
Title - Waitress Service - 500 words max