Epiphany
Flecks of rain adorn the glass;
a fluttering chaffinch clings
to a swinging twig; Atlantic winds
buffet each leafless bush,
and hale a rootless fir
over empty soil and grass.
Van Gogh’s mad cypresses,
flamed at a throbbing sky.
Here the demented stars The Level, Brighton 1987
grow masks; the trees bend low;
gales draw a fleeting curtain
over stage-lit men and women.
In narrow rooms we pace,
heedless of how it felt to walk
on a night perhaps like this,
heavy with god to a stable door.
©Terry Hodgson2005
The Storm
We lie quiet under the wind,
One child asleep, the others listen.
Doors and windows creak and rattle,
Glass shivers down the road,
And we, too, in our private rooms,
Shiver as smoke-stacks take the strain,
And the house tugs its moorings.
The lid lifts off the world,
Abstraction gathers form,
Pours over our horizons.
To brave this creature of the night
We rummage for candles,
Conjure white figures walking the wards,
The sick amid the crash and clatter,
Who cry out or sink in thought.
I recall a tide which raged
Over fishermen in shanty towns
(Five thousand dead in Osaka)
While I lay safe and quiet
In a hotel’s steel vibration.
Some vacuum somewhere calls;
This monster seeks out nothing,
But we, we seek out company,
Or pray to ghosts of paradigms,
Endeavouring to discover
Some long-lost security
Behind our tight-shut panes,
As a bush bowls down the avenue
And curtains shake and quiver.
©Terry Hodgson2001
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