Peacock Spider

PEACOCK SPIDER

Itsy tiny,
eight-eyed,
finger leggy
and grey

A thing of
arm and leg
hair plus the
 body fur

With two
pale tipped
brown antennae,
but hey

You have
to see the
umbrella of tail
he keeps for her.

The Winged Room

THE WINGED ROOM

The winged room is in a secret part
of the house, a soul door leading apart
from the clamour of a living opens up
out of enclosed walls to far revelations,
the vistas you often dreamed as a child
and the lost words you wanted to say
are moving on the read pages like music
played by heart, the pictures are drawn
in true colours, and the hope that yearns
ascends again, on its wings in live story,
call it centring, it is your genius at prayer.

- WDK

FOREST KINGFISHER

Forest Kingfisher

It flies between a tea-tree-bordered shallow reedy lake
And the weeping willows spread by a small farm dam,
Like a dart missile behind the spear wedge of officious nose
With a navy uniform jacket of coloured sky or water blue shining like
A blazon flag to herald its double periscope in submarine sniping
Like a creature built with a radar of eyes set over and after fish.

Five Winged Forms of Life on Planet Boolook

FOUR LOOKS AT LIFE ON PLANET BOOLOOK




1. Forest Kingfisher

It flies between a tea-tree-bordered shallow reedy lake
And the weeping willows spread by a small farm dam,
Like a dart missile behind the spear wedge of officious nose
With a navy uniform jacket of coloured sky or water blue shining like
A blazon flag to herald its double periscope in submarine sniping
Like a creature built with a radar of eyes set over and after fish.






2.


3.



4.





5. THE WINGED ROOM

The winged room is in a secret part
of the house, a soul door leading apart
from the clamour of a living opens up
out of enclosed walls to far revelations,
the vistas you often dreamed as a child
and the lost words you wanted to say
are moving on the read pages like music
played by heart, the pictures are drawn
in true colours, and the hope that yearns
ascends again, on its wings in live story,
call it centring, it is your genius at prayer.

- WDK

Corrugated Watertank

WATERTANK

A corrugated-iron watertank is unlike a beach
of sand where the tide has rippled up the skin,
for the galvanising breaks up the light in shards
like a platoon of silver-curved swords thrust out
above inside shadow, each glint of light on edge
is sharp as the dry dapples that hold the water in
strengthening the arm of the arc of flow-through
as the metal swings its left hook and its right to
join hands in the victory drink on the other side.

The gradually diminishing dull-echoed rungs were
the grim ladder rungs with which our grandparents
climbed up out of the droughts of summers past
each pewter-coin circle of stored rainwater a pool
of common use to be meted out by a careful glass
so even a dish of washwater carried splashless out
was lipped across a lettuce patch as dose in salve
for green stuff in the palate, it rung of no idle cream
familiar of beaches: frugal priority had real draught.

CHANGING WEATHER


The sun shines as it did;
high summer cloud wisps
up like summer cloud does;
as a birthday candle breeze
puffs the green leaves aflicker
and aglow as if a mind played
with a gift of light just like it was
another morning of the world.