Fallen Skies I’m trying to live under fallen skies, trying to live among crashed clouds crying, trying to live when even the sun stops smiling under fallen skies I’m trying. https://publicreverie.com/fallen-skies-and-echo/
Posts
This Winter My red all wool balaclava masks me so warmly this winter and hopefully my colour choice will distinguish me from the local would be bank robbers, if there are any about on this cold morning when frost crystals congeal in the wool and hang crystalline in the space left for eyes and mouth. Even those who know me best would fail to recognise me especially if everyone in town was wearing a red balaclava. https://stortellerpoetryreview.blogspot.com/2026/01/super-sized-series_0771647070.html
Tony It was a Physics Society party. I’d been to many and didn’t like them much. Physics students were creeps. Well, they were generally creeps, but Tony was different, he thought they were creeps as well, even though he was one of them. He was a miner’s son from North Yorkshire. He thought the rest were upper class, including me it seemed. ‘What did your father do?,’ he asked. It seemed weird to say ‘Tram Driver’ when the trams were so long gone and saying he was dead didn’t satisfy him, so, I opted for the marriage certificate occupation. ‘Garage Mechanic, that’s not bad’, he said. I didn’t share his experiences of class and entitlement, the students in my course were mainly working class Grammar School products, like Tony, like me, so I thought he had an unreasonable chip on his shoulder and we had nothing in common. Now I understand him better and wish I’d talked longer and known him more. I think we could have been friends. https://poetsonline.org/archiv...
The Melon Market It was a small town, Pec, in Kosovo now, then in Yugoslavia. It was 1966, the year before watermelons became illegal in Palestine. It was a small restaurant with no menu so communication wasn’t easy. But the guy on the next table spoke French opening up a channel of communication for us. John wanted to eat melon but there was no melon. Our French speaking friend, he was a friend by now, Had a late night solution. He took us to a large dry field, a melon market, he said. There were huge heaps of watermelons, dark green globes waiting in heaps. Each heap with its sleeping seller resting on a bed of melons. He shook one seller awake and carefully chose a melon. We all went home with him, he called the neighbours in and there we had a melon party eating great juicy slices off tin plates in a small house in Pec in 1966, the year before Israel banned watermelons in Palestine. https://masticadorestaiwan.wordpress.com/2026/01/26/the-melon-market-by-lynn-white/...
To Brian Patten (A Cento and Apostrophe) Yesterday you were my favourite living poet, there, watching and smiling, now yesterday seems so far away. So I wonder - did you build your ship of death, knowing you would need it, or did you rage - rage against the dying of the light and not go gentle into that good night when it was time to go, to bid farewell to one’s own self, and find an exit from the fallen self and falling skies. With one quick call dreams can be aborted and become like a marooned whale. Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul, has her footing washed away, as age dark flood rises, cold dash of waves at the ferry-warf - posh and ice in the river, a gray discouraged sky overhead .. is there anything more? So you should build your ship of death for the long journey towards oblivion, knowing a man can his own quietus make. But still the heart of me weeps to belong where a slow, sad bird has flown, only twilight now and the soft “s...