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 

The Old Bridge

How far stone endures,

not in only great monuments –

temples, ruins, castles, cathedrals –

but wonders of the everyday:

how, quarried, split, cut, shaped,

it’s fabricated for houses, bridges,

pocked and scored by climate,

worn-smooth by traffic,

inscribed by time and the impulse

to see what’s on the other bank.

Leaning over grainy parapet,

we’re pausing again to look

down into water furling at pillars,

heading for an elsewhere we can’t tell.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Midsummer

Static heat and a veil of light across fields,

a too-bright sky bring us back to this path,

its attendant hedgerows and here

in the nooks of dry stone walls

pale seasonal flowers as if in hiding.

Between shifts we’d be out in midsummer,

taking to that familiar stretch of farmland

and each other: infinite worlds

among the cornstalks, under pebbles,

in the splash and froth of busy streams –

soon we’ll have to return or move on,

but for the moment, love, here’s

the pair of us, out of harm’s way,

shading our eyes against the sun.

Midsummer’s Day is on 21st June in Britain and 24th June in Bulgaria.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Bloomsday

Judiciously in absentia from rumorous circulations,

Joyce embarked on his reconstructive journey

somewhere beyond the plate-glass windows

and reversing lorries of Zürich bahnhof –

conjured Bloom to wander a Dublin question mark,

and Stephen, his fallen, fearful Telemachus.

Rough magic and heavenly music,

from Sandymount Strand to Eccles Street,

from declarative ‘Stately’ to reparative ‘Yes’,

signatures of all things, words changing colour –

a single day amounting to an odyssey,

refindings of the ineluctably modal.

16th June is Bloomsday – the anniversary of the day in 1904 on which James Joyce set ‘Ulysses’ – a novel written in Trieste, Zürich and Paris.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Apples

Sharp, crisp smells in the packing shed,

another year’s crop despatched

along conveyors, boxed, crated

loaded onto trucks: our village industry

of pickers, sorters, packers,

ladders propped among branches,

trugs of cookers and eaters,

a methodical tree-by-tree advance.

All I would do to take you there –

to those orchards beside our lane,

their close fruit-heavy ranks,

some time towards the tail-end

of a Cold War summer

of beer gardens and mown grass –

all I can do amounts to these words,

the taste of these apples.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips 

Jean Valjean

Articulate among the rocks

of this expedient exile

not so far from home,

what thoughts, what stories

recur like aftertastes

of not so haute cuisine ...

Victor Hugo on Guernsey,

amongst his poems

and les miserables,

plotting the fate

of convict Jean Valjean,

the sea his own barricades.

22 May was the 129th anniversary of Victor Hugo’s death.

Image: Marina Shiderova; text: Tom Phillips