#roberthale

My Dear Friends

Birch leaves flutter, now the summer swelter Shows its back, and I remember It was a time of frenzy The great return to school To meet old friends, to make some new But nowadays it's not as gay as that

A woman lies stripped, bloodied, bruised On a jail cell floor, her name? Iran. She's hopeless as The ticking of the prison clock From forty years of horror and shock And I am not that child, anymore

Pooya shifts his glass, says we have one chance To avenge the crime, his great hope? Trump, maybe he'll invade (Sad hopes, forlorn. How, now Young folk can hope for war?) And nothing I can say will change his mind

Of arguments I find myself all too short Apart from all of this, we're fine

Your friend

M

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Copyright (c) “M” and Robert Hale 2020.

(Image: People of Iran by Hamed Saber / CC BY [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0] from Wikimedia Commons)

Laughing in the dark she smacks your skin alert Then throws her pearls out wide across the universe While in the spaces between rocks and pines she hides It is a game, and from the tops of waves she flies Then dives To free the nightbirds from their silver trap A dozen ghostly forms lift off against the black Quick to rise and quick to fade For the moon is lost on the other side And her breath now gathers dense as life Thick as a memory of her smile She knows you know It’s time for some to live and some to die In the beauty of her darkest night

Copyright © Robert Hale 2021.

From lands of green and plenty You travelled north to meet me I thought you would have loved me Your road was long and hard, and you did not give up But you came and saw, and love me you did not Your thoughts and prayers were only for your lover lost And for all that I am holy Your black-clad priests did only fear me

With your words I'm falsely named In sayings, proverbs, thoughts and songs In poems, myths and sagas I'm defamed Rejected, I am the cradle of the damned In hymns and prayers I shall be refused Because I hide the snarling thing unchained The thing reflected in your dreams But look well, it is only you

Few know how I am really blessed Few see in me what others missed I come in peace, I am Your softest bed of rest And the one for whom your eyes are made Was my lover first Who travelling through me Led you to the gleaming forest glade As I watched from the space between the trees Between the stars, where in the depths of mystery I stood and shed my tears

No, I am the cradle of all that lives And dies This nobody sees Your eyes For me are blind

Copyright © Robert Hale 2021.

Images that come and come again Like ghosts Never can they be held

A path weaves bleak across a shallow grassy rise Large boulders here and there about the land Then, a saddle wide across to the greater climb There the way goes up and round the mountain's pleated skirts On an outer bend a way station, a little tea shop stop Though high, we are but on a lower slope And up the trail, an unremembered wilderness I want so much once more to travel on To where I travelled on another day But always time runs out, the image fades Before I make the way

I know the river bend lies beyond the wood and over hill Descend the cliff and there, a spot of rarest beauty Wide and deep the river runs with rocky islands off the bend And then, downstream the shallows ripple in delight Warm is the sun in the dying afternoon Oh, to dive and swim under waters clear and sweet To hunt like an otter, breathe like the trout But always darkness falls, the air comes cold Before I make the river bank

By the sea there's a beach that stretches away beyond sight or thought A place I know so well and yet again know not at all The way there etched rough and deep into my bone So many times I've joined the waves in play Each time I sorely yearn to play again But summer quickly turns to chill and dark And as I run the sun's last rays are fading fast And as I run I lose the way so well I know And always winter's curtain falls Before I make the shore

Images that come and come again Like phantoms Never to be held

Copyright © Robert Hale 2018, 2021.

Sleeping by the waterfall Darling little one The river singing for you softly Its forever song

You had hardly lived Before you had to go But the world showed you secrets Only made for you

Dreams floating by like jewels Sweet shadowed memories Do you see the flowers In those mystery hills of green?

Remember the mist after rain? The darting of the swifts? And Gecko on the ceiling Going chik-chik-chik-chik-chik?

Asleep by the waterfall You precious little one Butterflies dance above your brow A journey just begun

Can you hear the call of the doo-doo-doo bird? Insects whistling out of sight? The laughter of the evening frogs And the thousand sounds of night?

Sunlight patterns through the leaves A leaf floats to your chest Carried like you, our little one On fragrant air of East

You had hardly lived at all Before you had to go But the world showed you secrets Only made for you

You saw it all with priceless eyes Left magic dust on Earth Now carry your jewels with open hands Across the universe

Sleeping by the waterfall Darling little one The river singing for you softly Its forever song

Copyright © Robert Hale 2019.

(Image: Background photo of waterfall by the author. Superimposed photo of girl sleeping from Maxpixels.net, reproduced according to Creative Commons licence CC0 1.0.)

Up by heaven’s door The old man came down With plates of ćevapi We sat sipping beer The old partisan And we foreign three

And here he tells a tale of how They pulled his nails out in the war Their voices in his ear still now A hateful, hated sound And stroking the Aussie girl’s soft cheek Wistful is his smile As he digs his bullets in the ground And a glisten pricks his eye But no tear does he let fall

Up by heaven’s gate In the shadow of three peaks The day is getting late The ruffled water’s almost black The northern shore is wild and far Long black clouds are coming down Then ice balls hiss the churning lake And standing in an old hay barn You shiver like a new born ghost You must walk free, but now It’s getting dark, you cannot see

Back in town What’s fun, the American asks With walking in the rain You reply to you its all the same Then Jan takes up his old guitar He’s knocking on heaven’s door And you laugh as you begin to sing Jan, take these boots off of me ‘Coz I don’t need them any more And on the step three fates sit listening Up by heaven’s door

Copyright © Robert Hale 2019.

(Memories of Bled and Bohinj, Slovenia, c. 1981.)

I can see just halfway down the lane we walk along There the curling mist obscures the further view I think it must be just as beautiful beyond As it is behind The going here is good, the map is true But who will know this way once the map is lost? Or when the lane itself is naught but gravel under forest roots?

We hear a cello playing through a window as we pass The gaslight seems to flicker with its pitch and strength The notes sound well but fade as distance reaches back Of beauty strangely heightened from afar Its loveliness follows on our steps Will any remain that tells, through the heavy silence of the mist? Who will move to her tune when the cellist lays down her bow?

I read from a book I found along the way A poem at once bewitching and bewitched That pulsed and breathed and took to wing Then as I read, flew and danced as real before my eyes But my eyes grew dim before I reached the end Leaving sore longing in my heart The book abandoned now is turned to dust That rises from the tread of travellers next How long can what flew forth bewitch? Or has the bewitching vanished with the book?

A photo flutters in the breeze, jumping on, one step away I see your smile again as it takes to air, too quick to catch A smile in your eyes to pump the heart and burst Will the smile remain when the photo pulps to mud in rain? Or parches yellow and cracks under the harshly biting sun?

My love, my friend, my father, mother, brother, cousin all My fellow seekers met, my fellow walkers arm-in-arm Who with us have shared a way upon the lane Through curling mist the cellist notes we loved The poet’s words like siren songs upon our ears Your countenance we loved as one of us and more Your footfall was of our life as much as of your own Will we hear it once our flesh is washed to earth? Will your time with us have sense once our bones and yours Are dust on the lane, or gravel under forest roots?

Purposes and purpose, awareness and awarenesses Meanings, meaning, feelings, feeling Connections and connection All of this and nothing In a flickered gaslight flame, refracted Through a cellist’s window pane On the lane we walk along Before the curling mist Obscures the view

Copyright © Robert Hale 2018. Yorkshire, England, November 2018.

Through the stark vastness of window glass To the void of a night-time February street There is nothing, but she does not look Just a mirror, but she dare not see – To examine it gets just too bleak There is nothing, there, any more She will not look and does not speak

A waiter, a glass of water on a tray For her, a beer for him, She looks about the room, looks to the street Looks to the awful window glass, the marks Of all dried up raindrops past He looks at his beer, at the door, at his feet He stares at his beer, he does not speak

Middle age passes like that lone white van On the street. Her face, once winning Bright smiling on a bright wedding day In May, now Is pickle-sour His is a greying piece of card, a menu Unchanging, with nothing to choose And the van goes on its way

An inch-thick dirty raindrop spotted pane Three yards tall Bisects the universe between them wall to wall Made of crystalline dumb despair And each with a cap of boredom screwed Each day so tightly round the skull It hurts it screeches dull dull dull

Escape is an unlikely thing now From a going-to-death neither foresaw Recognition, a slow-sliding worm And nothing ever was done to turn Away from that giant sucking leech The leech is filled, the spirit anaemic now Too weak To even to crawl Or reach For a better kind of death

Santa Eulària des Riu, Eivissa, February 2018.