A Cup of Cherries

Outside the kitchen, from the bench,

you look up into branches that you might call –

were they human – over-enthusiastic.

Sparrows, finches occupy

a wooden cascade.

Let them have their gluttony.

Their chirping arguments

are a kind of drama.

When it’s time again,

we'll remember –

go out picking with plastic bowls,

put cups of cherries on the sideboard.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

The Piper

Intrigued by affinities,

we’re talking again

on a favourite theme:  

how traversing

reputed distances

we keep stumbling

across common ground.

Maybe here’s something

we might take for a clue:

suggestive plangencies,

bagpipe music,

exiled to the shores

of Celtic Europe,

held tight to

in the Rhodope Mountains.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

July Morning

How light works to bring back world

and summer put on rash splendour:

such homecomings and departures

as city rooftops shield appear –

as they might rightly be – adventure.

Not so much grateful for small mercies

as learning to spot small miracles,

you’ll be savouring thick coffee smells

and prospects of a day unfolding

into distant car-horns, rumorous traffic

as colour glides in to repossess

the crags and angles of night’s canyons.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Old Trees

Somewhere, not far inside the gates,

but not so far beyond the artificial pond,

its muddy cusps slimed with frog spawn,

I’d be little more than five years old

and struck by the lightning-split trunks,

the furred bark, the sheer age of trees.

Like that sliced-through giant Redwood

in the Natural History Museum

with rings picked-out marking dates

of human events, it wasn’t so much

our frailty they brought to mind

as their own solidity, their endurance.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips