Glen Phillips 

 

I Wouldn’t Have Missed It For Quids


Looking back on that day,
it all turned out so strangely,
yet vivid still, as a movie scene—
kitchen, wood-fire and cake a-baking,
rain bucketing down on pony
and poddy calves and two stark
muscovies—puddle reflected,
I say thanks for the invite, sister.

Kitchen, car shed, hayshed
but no red wheelbarrow
in the rain. Sorrows the gods
might have signalled they knew
by these downpours. Yet grief
shared, like creatures great
and small and the river running by,
takes many forms. Can have long
strings. Thanks for the invite, sister.



5 Minutes After 5 Years


It amounts to what? A shoebox
of shuffled memories , sheets
of paper, a posed photograph
of a happy couple against the wall
in the photographer’s cheap rooms?

If you walked all the way back
beside the slow-moving mighty
river to where the first white
rapids begin in their rushing course
you could see the tumble of foam.

Here the beginning rivulets
of this river of dreams that slides
ponderously when near to the sea,
now instead spurt in their myriad
frenzy, scattering careless spray.

Or so they say. Oh isn’t the free
fall of a torrent more than wasted joy?
More than firecracker paper—at least
a taste of forbidden freedom, that
elsewise might never come?




 


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