Poetry - Lynn White

  No Swimming Here I don’t even miss it anymore. Well, I was never good at it, could never manage a crawl,   just a slow breaststroke, or backstroke before my hair grew long and needed protection from the chlorine. But I did go twice a week regularly, as regular as clockwork, as regularly as religious people went to church on Sundays. So it left a gap, an absence at first. Then there were the friends, seen now only in passing   in the street or at the Co-op or in writing, heard only on the telephone not in the echoey pool or drowned out in the showers. So there was an absence. There is an absence. All is quiet there now and so I am still waiting. We are all waiting still waiting. https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2021/06/29/no-swimming-here-by-lynn-white-i-am-still-waiting-series/

  Dreams And Plastic Smiles The accordion player was from Eastern Europe. He was there each morning on the promenade in the south of Spain, He plays popular songs with an unremitting plastic smile. A little further along sits the beggar with no legs. He is also from Eastern Europe. He sits there every day with an unremitting plastic smile and a cardboard sign written in English and Spanish. I wonder what lit the fuse to set them off on their incredible journey into the unknown. I wonder if the smiles fade on the way back to their new homes. I wonder if the dreams have faded or whether they scrape along   as the men scrape along. Or perhaps they’re as vibrant as ever, full of hope, surviving in the mild winters, ready to blossom like the cherry trees   in the spring. https://www.odyssey.pm/contributors/lynn-white-2/

  Photo Opportunity I watched the man crossing the path underneath the cascade of the waterfall. It had been part of the route wine was carried from the high lands, to be sold on the coast. Back in the old days, that was. But the old days weren’t very long ago. He seemed confident as he placed a foot carefully in each of the footholds hacked into the precipitous rock face. He gripped the thick metal hawser attached to the rock with strong metal rings. Gripped it firmly and proceeded slowly one step at a time. I had a camera and I thought that it was a picture he would like to have when he was dry and safe back on terra firma. Then I thought, suppose he falls, falls into the waves, to be smashed against the rocks far below. I didn’t want to have such a picture, a picture of someone’s last moments and I thought, to take it may jinx his journey and even cause him to fall. So I never took the picture. But it made no difference. The man fell anyway. https://www.odyssey.pm/contributors/lynn-

  Closed It was a beautiful village, the sun was shining, the mountain air pure, a perfect place for a coffee. We could see two cafes, but the first we tried was closed, closed for a while by the looks. The second looked hopeful with tables and chairs outside but the door was locked. An elderly man came over and explained. that it only opened at weekends. The other had closed because the people had left the village. They all want to live in the town, he told us and now the houses are empty and there are just a few tourists who come at weekends to drink a coffee or a beer. He told us to sit at a table and went into a house across the street and returned with a tray and three good French coffees made in his own kitchen. So we sat in the sunshine breathing in the pure mountain air, a perfect place for a coffee with our new friend. https://www.odyssey.pm/contributors/lynn-white-2/

  Playtime Imagine a sitting room peopled with dolls an attic space filled with toy trains and cars adult places filled with children’s playthings passive playthings out of their time and moved on into a time when even the box with it’s wrappings and writings fails to excite us creating no spark, no glamour, only needy memories in passing as time moves on. https://poetry.mywovenwords.com/playtime/

  Quicksilver Always on the move, darting here, dipping there, blowing hot, blowing cold, mercurial as quicksilver dispensing woe or joy in clouds of dust, fairy dust, falling like starlight and landing somewhere. I’m just the messenger, she said, I don’t get to choose, gold or silver, coal or shale, it’s just dust blowing in the wind and landing somewhere, I don’t get to choose, she said. But I wonder. https://freeverserevolution.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/fvr-issue-ii-summer-2021.pdf

  Leaded Lights The glass is cut, so carefully cut, so carefully arranged to break up the light as it reflects it in a kaleidoscope of colour. Light cracked by lead, bright white   or gilded by sunshine or bent into rainbows refracted to paint colours in reflected shadows to be carried by a quixotic messenger and reflected into grey lives. The reflection is fragmenting as it falls breaking up the grey, so that even the shafts   of multi-coloured illumination can make no sense of it. https://freeverserevolution.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/fvr-issue-ii-summer-2021.pdf

  Dreamscape Soon the light will be fading and the crows are circling like winged messengers, a cawing cacophony,   harbingers of death   and confusion. We try to make sense   of our once familiar place searching in vain for the water which we know we must find and cross. Searching for something,   anything to give us a bearing, to help us find the river in this dreamscape of another world. But perhaps   we have already crossed over. https://freeverserevolution.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/fvr-issue-ii-summer-2021.pdf

  Blowing In The Wind It was a windy day in a windy city a long time ago. A sudden flurry made me into the vortex and I was surrounded by sheets of paper caught up and blown from a doorway. When it had settled,   I collected a few. They were letters applying for jobs dated about fifty years ago, I forget exactly when. All were hand written   in the most beautiful cursive scripts. I could visualise the care with which nibs had been dipped in ink, the concentration in the touch of pen to paper. These were the stuff of unknown dreams. The names are long forgotten now but I wonder what became of them, those ghosts of a past who touched my life in a flurry of wind only to be blown away. https://fragmentedmagazine.com/magazine/

  Leaving Last night at the theatre I saw you again, Your smile in a face so much younger. My confusion, my thoughts, my stares made him turn and your warm smile chilled me with ice melting now from the long frozen lock, the key turning freely to let out our past. And my past, and it’s future all came flooding back, the shock of sensations long gone. The dance and the music, the books that we read, the memories that we must both have of the pain and the pleasures,   that were part of our love such a long time ago. So I ask myself now, can anything stay to give pleasure to us in remembering those days? For my remnants now seem to be only pain, and their sadness engulfs me   and halts my return. So I left, in the end, as I left you, my love, Saying nothing, taking nothing, leaving nothing behind. Without saying goodbye. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096LTTVP2?fbclid=IwAR1jnB2vzqUyj54cX7_QRS4VYiqIyen6TAC4D94Nba4x4LV_0EX79vYMJI4

  Roots It’s said that you should remember your roots, remember where you came from, remember where you belong, anchored by your long tap root. But I have fibrous roots too, growing out strongly from the main tap. I have spread them out and put them down in many places, taken sustenance from them. They’ve been part of my growth, fed my main stem and its splits and branches. I’ve branched out from them and belonged in them all, all those places. And some rootlets have broken free and I’ve left them behind there no longer belonging to me. And I’ve left something of myself behind. Would I find it if I returned? I don’t think so. But others may   still. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096LTTVP2?fbclid=IwAR1jnB2vzqUyj54cX7_QRS4VYiqIyen6TAC4D94Nba4x4LV_0EX79vYMJI4

  Maybe Tonight As I close my eyes and meditate to free my mind. I think of   calm blue water, flowers and trees. Maybe tonight I’ll sleep and my head will fill with sweet dreams of still water. Maybe tonight dreamily drowsy I’ll dream of bathers in a calm blue pool. Maybe tonight I’ll sleep. https://sparkedlitmag.com/june-2021-issue/

  Paradise Lost It was paradise, a perfect life in the sunshine for the two of them. Eating the luscious fruits, drinking the succulent juices. Wanting for nothing. Nothing, except,   perhaps,   to know the reason for it all. To know where they came from, where they were going, what point there was to it all. To understand it all would take some thought, some working out, some researching of their paradise. They would need to exercise their intelligence to find the answers to all these questions. Then they could   be content again in their paradise with their new found knowledge. It came to them suddenly, the penny dropped not the apple. In a flash of understanding   they saw that tomorrow could be different   That one tomorrow   would certainly be different. That human life doesn't go on and on without an end. It will end and it's ending is unpredictable, the where and how and when unknown. How could they live with this knowledge and remain in paradise. This was a new question