Wall Written

The aisle is full of strange noises,
students struggling with shopping in this
posh supermarket, losing their
Marx in the pages of their
textbooks as they search for the
perfect pasta—
penne, penne,
tekel, upharsin.

                                                                                           Steve Finn

Towing the Queen Mary

How do you tell a great actress
she’s got it wrong? After all, she was
knocking it out of the park when I was
still in school, beautiful and brash yet
innocent in her youth, sharp and
subtle in maturity and always
on time, off book, a perfect pro.
Nevertheless, today she was skating, and on
my thin ice, since no one would blame her for an
off day, but I was supposed to be
directing her.

“Are you sure, Steve?” she would ask after each
gentle nudge, as I felt like a tug
towing the Queen Mary out of an
extremely tight dock until suddenly she
grasped exactly what I wanted and,
under her own power, left safe harbour
out onto the fathomless
ocean of her art.

                                                                                         © Steve Finn

“….bitten by a dead bee”

I don’t suppose he will be missed,
the bee I found dying on the
garden slabs.

I doubt there’s anyone
counting them out and back again
in the hive.

And does death mean anything to creatures
so small? In nature, after all, death is so
commonplace.

Still, it crawls—perhaps searching for that
out-of-the-way place the living seem to
seek to die, for

only the snails, whose trails end in
sudden corpses, carry on their backs their
own cairns.

                                                                                     © Steve Finn 

Vacancies

Our annual starlings have vacated for
more commodious lodgings in the
neighbour roof, evicting the
sparrows who now noisily inhabit the
servants’ quarters under the tiles,
above the guttering, though they
don’t seem to mind.

Meanwhile, another starling—an
offspring perhaps, drawn back by the
smell of struggle, warm worms and
fledging—takes up the vacant tenancy,
clueless initially, rummaging through
last year’s squalor, haphazardly
filching the lost property of the garden: a
gull’s quill, the underdown from
pigeons, a piece of greenery
too long to fit and left
hanging from the gutter.

But somehow it works, a female
approves the refurbishment,
moves in, mates, lays, hatches, and they
ferociously feed some maw I
can hear but cannot see, while

over us all, a
woodpigeon flaps
like laundry.

                                                                                    Steve Finn

Hill Climb

When climbing a steep hill
I find it best
not to eye the crest
but to study my feet and
watch my step as it’s
safer not to know
how far it is to go.

Cat’s Cradle

I’m imprisoned by my cat’s craving
for company and warmth, her
declension of nose-rubbing,
paw-kneading, purring
finally settling into that
curl of fur, pinioning my
human hopes of doing
beneath her indolence, her
thrumming and the
occasional sigh
when dreams of
catching mice
go awry.

Tugs

Living on chalk, even

thirty-six hours of stolid rain

vanished quickly into

deep aquifers, the late

sharp sun chiseling

laggard clouds into fat

insistent tugs nudging the

bulk of rain into a

deeper berth out at

sea.

Cyclamen

Andy cleared the beds of the
sun-scorched plants and from the
newly-bare earth sprang
cyclamen, long buried now
free to scatter their
delicate flowers all over
the dead season.

Hips

God,
even at this late stage, please
give me hips, to spare me the
indignity of my trousers
falling down in the
presence of others, no matter how
tightly I tie my belt.

You wouldn’t want me to wear
braces would you, with all their
connotations of plutocrats or
paunchy old men shuffling in slippers?
No, make me for once like my wife, whose
gold-link belt seems to
swoon about her waist in defiance of
gravity and, dare I say it, you
God.

The Summer Stars

I’m lost now
in the Region of the Summer Stars.
My preference was always for their
Winter brethren, but I could
find my way to the Summer Triangle—
Altair, Deneb, Vega; follow the
curve of the Plough’s handle to
red Arcturus and Spica in Virgo;
could even riddle out hidden corners like
Scutum Sobieski; and once gazed on the
green, milky oval of the great
Andromeda Galaxy; though in
murky, lamp-lit England I’ve only seen my
home Galaxy, all splendour and dust,
a handful of times.

Now they are just stars my
failing eyesight cannot resolve, their
beauty impervious to my
ignorance.

(With apologies to Charles Williams)