Taylor’s Mistake
sketchy
mother & daughter
out to sea
littered shoes
grapes
a novel
between waves
breathing
fingertip strips
sand and sky
Dad
the hardest punctuation of all
the full-stop
in the night
your semicolon of breathing
brackets of thought
floating through air
speech marks
as people gather to celebrate & grieve
but
the full-stop
your body
then the open sentence
question marks rattling
like wind in the trees
The Grandpop poems
I
all day
digging
the dirt piles up
the heavy shovel
you heft over your shoulder
and the sweat!
must be time for a cold one
nurse’s footsteps
in the corridor
and a clipboard banging
the end of the bed
an earwig crawls
the side of the hole you have made
all your hopes and dreams
are down there
when noone looks
your mouth slips away
II
wash of yellow ochre
with a superimposed wash of rose madder
a single flower
blots on the windowsill
To put in wash
your eyes a wrinkled blue
wet paper with a sponge
paper at 30°
the bed winched forward
a slurp of watery tea
stroke across starting at top
all the things you didn’t say
your grumble of breathing
and a silence
III
cadmium yellow
pale or lightest
cadmium red
light or deepest
yellow ochre
raw sienna
venetian red
viridian
cerulean blue
lamp black
mars black
