Each Other
Icy weather – out breed the fuzzy bodies
pumping each other’s heat, guzzling contact,
furious and frost in the ground.
Summer – a mother pants her windows open,
wasps and hay in the June air,
bull heat gumming the casements
and her children running away.
The hottest months run us away from each other,
field steeped, blossom hugging, blankets off.
December stamps us close in village squares,
buttoned, cheeks ringing like clock towers,
pub cornered, breathing each other’s red faces.
Bickering under the gold solstice, the confusion
of wine, excessive space, burnt ears on lawns,
the tyranny of giddiness and communal time.
The mother cannot see her children
from the window, flown, everywhere white sun.
Something dies for autumn
and the end of light.
Husbands and wives, forced and human,
held into each other by the year’s cold drop,
planted unions in our snow at night.
Distinctions
between the waking
and sleeping parts
of the damn day.
Get up, morning
prince, your kingdom|
not yet yours, five
Magpies, no milk
caps or treasure
stolen or raised
from birth’s deep home,
10am says
‘This is rising’ –
savannah, brood,
cathedral, up
in the air, there’s
hope when dawn does
its thing best, when
you can see it.
The First Walks
Home and very abroad, went king dreaming,
crowns sitting deep in the English soil,
grass stubbornly up; frostless, it all waves
as one green orchestra, but the shining
single blade, oh yes! Field heavy days,
brass clots held to the scaffold of trees,
Autumn has it! Still plenty to say of
old leaves, the dead fire of neural pathways.
A season where you burn things off.
Rob Yates has recently returned to the UK after 2 years abroad, moving and living in Indonesia and New Zealand. He has work forthcoming in Agenda and has had poems appear in various online magazines.