Memento Mori

Dense blackness yields
To a chill grey dawn
Clammy air sticks
To my skin

Dread stalks me
Death marks out its targets
Nearing with each step

Soon enough, it will strike
To my very heart.
Much better to face
The threat myself
Than watch helpless
As it takes those I love

The terrible calculus
Of such balancing
Sours the soul
But denial is vain evasion

The memory of yesterday's
Crisp sunshine seems
An age away
A paradise
Before the Fall


26/10/10

Gardening

Gardening (detail)  Martin Locock acrylic on board C 2010

She stoops to place fresh

Flowers on the gravel square

And removes browned blooms

Her work done, she stands

Her eyes cloud as she reads the

Simple inscription

Soon she'll rejoin him

She weaves away through thickets

Of marble headstones

7/4/2010

Patination

Burnished with wear, the ring
Is pitted and tarnished: it sits
On the mantelpiece, no longer
Warmed by proximate blood;
The finger it encircled reduced
To fleshless bone.

Smelted, forged, wrought
And tempered, the ring retains
Its form on cooling. The fading
Of the heart's heat leaves
No shape memory.

Love's season

We met in a shower of apple blossom
Loosened by winter's final frost

We kissed as daffodils
Peeked warily from the soil

Our love ripened with the berries:
straw, rasp, black

Autumn brought barrenness
Winter, solitude