catching up on recently-composed poems…
Keep scrolling down!
WAVE WONDERING
26th December / 2nd January 2021
What makes the sound of a wave?
How much is it the clash of the sea with itself;
How much, the outbursting of water-pounced air?
Thus begged, questions over rough water on mountain lakes,
About rough water in thin air:
Do high waves break differently, sound differently, surf differently,
Oxygenate more or less…?
Yet again, our understanding shown for sparse!
© Christopher Jessop 2021
WINDHOVER
26th December / 2nd January 2021
Kestrel, above meadow table-steady
Despite those cutty squalls and,
All about,
Their silhouettes swirling like smutty spindrift,
Finches intent on irritation.
© Christopher Jessop 2021
CHRISTMAS RAINBOWS
26th December 2020 / 2nd January 2021
An afternoon of Christmas rainbows.
Curving colours pure as artists’ oils newly out-tubed,
Bold against that slate backdrop of sleet storms:
Those gale-draped weighty curtains of Northern cold.
Rainbows:
Flashing into existence and now gone,
Blanked by this day’s fast-rolling weather,
Before cameras can be grabbed…
Thus the more charming, their moments.
But then, where they brightly were,
The sky’s scenery shifts clear;
And, beyond that anchored laden tanker,
Stern-squatting to windward in the tide’s skew,
We are windowed
With rich contrasts and sharp details
Above this broad bay’s far shore.
And while Ramsey and the Bishop and Clerks
Remain horizoned by leadbelly cumulonimbus,
Fickle north-eastern distance astonishes
A reveal of Alpine Presceli–
Soon again hidden by a brushstroke of snow.
And now homeward,
Thoughts gladding ahead to heat of hearth,
Past claw-reaching willows
Which graw the air loud
Against the wrenches of its strong-willed squalls.
© Christopher Jessop 2021
