dVerse Poets Pub

The Faint

humanist55

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Grace in OpenLinkNight has been asking for a poem of our own choosing. A week or so ago, one of my grandsons – an F2 Junior Doctor, fainted whilst working on his hospital ward. He has fainted once before for much the same reasons as this poem explores… Junior Doctors as they are called, have been on a cycle of strikes for months now, here in England!

Fainting is not a feminine attribute
Nor yet a signal effect of fear
When the wave comes upon you like Canute
You cannot command the tide “Disappear!”
Long hours, small meals, emotional turmoil
These will do the trick of draining blood
Effects of low blood pressure you cannot foil
And you will fall right where you stood
Causing alarm to staff and patients
But quickly picked up, handled with patience
Nurses have seen these faints before and told
The management of overworked young doctors
Who, stress-loaded, sleep and food-deprived, folded
Nurses cannot be the Doctor’s Proctors
Can’t change the way the system’s moulded
So Junior Doctors do the very best you can
Demand more pay, less hours
Take every chance to stick it to “the Man”
For by your bedside we can’t bring now banned flowers…

Narcissi Dreams

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Who would not fancy
a tête à tête
with a lemon beauty
in the golden dawn

The golden echo
of the love call
of luscious lingerie
and beautiful eyes

I wake with double smiles
to my catalogue of
narcissi bulbs, dreaming
still of orange progress
and pink pride…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Image created with Midjourney

Written for dVerse Poets Pub where merrildsmith in Poetics is challenging us to conjure a poem out of the names of narcissi…

Six Questions (from Pablo Neruda)

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Over at dVerse Poets Pub  Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft is our host and has asked us to write Ghazal using at least one of the lines by Pablo Neruda from his book of poetry – “The Book of Questions” in which he poses 320 questions and answers in couplet form, and she has asked us to use at least one of the six question lines she has selected. I found all six questions stimulating and linked them in this poem.

Why was I not born mysterious? – Sorrowful
Then nations would smite down my enemy furious – angry

Why did I grow up without companions – lonely
compadres and friends in this world so curious? – and unloved

And do unshed tears wait in little lakes – weeping
lurking to ambush we unwary and drown us? – vulnerable

And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes – landless
springing up in the rubble of our homes mocking us? – homeless

How long do others speak if we have already spoken – quashed
one hundred years, pleading, crying and dying in the dust? – and denied

Even hope itself may eventually die – we should be hopeless
Isn’t it better never than too late for us? – flattened too.

How long do others speak if we have already spoken? – We still
As long as it takes for you to hear us – cry out

And Why does Spring once again offer its green clothes? – bear children
Because life must triumph, improbable, delirious – all we can

And do unshed tears wait in little lakes? – don’t hold back
Yes but cry them, use them, water the dust – start again

Why did I grow up without companions? – seek new friends
Because the world heard only another victim’s fuss – in a world of oppressed

Why was I not born mysterious? – we find other victims in common
See the wonderful in the ordinary which is us – our voices raised together

There are no especially deserving winners – give us all our due
no one deserves our land over us – “Equality now!”

Equal status and our own statehood – “Never Again!”
with nobody ruling over us – “Give us Our Due!”

Borrowing these six Neruda questions – “Now!”
the poet, Andrew, seeks to give voice to us…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Once on a plane…

humanist55

Dublin to Manchester
Once on a plane
I found a pair of sunglasses
a polarising pair
with circular lenses
of Matrix cool
left by the last occupant
missed between flights by the
cabin clean up crew
I have those glasses still
more than twenty years later
I’m a keeper.

Teneriffe to Gatwick
Once on a plane
I had the last moments
with my first great love
then she asked me to
hang back at the checkout
because her husband
was meeting her
and thought she was
holidaying alone.

Stanstead to Dublin
Once on a plane
I contemplated
flying to meet a woman
I had known only for
one chaste night
of intimations
who then sent me a ticket
for a weekend in County Leitrim

Manchester to Heraklion
Once on a plane
fleeing the pandemic
one step ahead of lockdown
I looked down on the Alps
a wilderness of mountains
as far as the eye could see
from thirty-five thousand feet
and saw not a trace of
human life, no villages
no roads, no smoke
as if already
we never existed

A Flight to Anywhere
More than once on a plane
I wonder about the lives
of Air Hostesses
or Hosts
or Stewards
as they are now called
whether they joined to
see the world
and whether they did
whether it’s true about
the crew parties
the god-like officers
marriage material
or just better advantaged
the ordinariness of
Ryanair crew
the haughty select of Air Aegean
each one as from the pages
of a 50’s fashion magazine
do the ordinary despise the haughty
meeting en passant
in some airport corridor
or do they share a common bond
of brother and sisterhood
is it just another flight
from one take off
to another landing
once on a plane…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Posted for Open Link Night at dVerse the Poets Pub

Learning the Ropes of Love

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How can I say I thank you
for the mixed bag of emotions
which I will call Love
for want of a better word –
which I learned at your knee
whilst having no inkling
of even being schooled…

Love is nurturing
– on a physical level
of feeding at least
and on the mental level
of stimulation
with books and ideas
and even a trip
around the world

Love is safety and
love is the absence of danger
which is not necessarily
the same thing

Love is consistency
which can go a long way
towards making up
for other deficiencies

Love is giving a sense of
who you are and
what your place is
in the wider world
– it is not sufficient
to teach you to talk to
anyone from a tramp to the Queen
if you don’t know what you want to say.


Imposter syndrome is
as transferrable as
a gene for diabetes
and like that disease
it will be a long time
before you even figure out
you have it – and what “It” is
there is no gene sequencer
for emotional baggage…

We learn to love like
layers of an onion
and so much depends
on the fertility of the soil
which is that original family
and however crooked
the plant grows –
be glad if you at least
had a family.

Love starts with a teat
your mother’s if you are lucky
or perhaps a bottle
freely given on demand

Love expands too
if you are lucky enough
to have siblings –
you add another layer
to your personal culture
when you go to school
when you expand your horizons
to town, country and
however much of the world
you are lucky enough to encounter

If you are not lucky
and your bulb grows amongst stones,
is not fed good food and
stimulation for the mind –
if you encounter trauma
by loss, violence or abuse
your multilayered onion
will reflect its origins…

Eventually you may break away
from the family home,
home town
and learn of other loves
but your affinity has
already set by
earlier lessons learned
This one is never secure
That one is self-centred
This one is restless
and That one puts up with
rather than taking care of themselves

Love is as varied as
the human beings who practise it
and the combinations in couples
as varied as the genes
they may mesh together
in the lottery of life

But lucky or unlucky
everybody needs to know
what they learned of love
and work out what works
for them and those they love…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Posted for Open Link Night at dVerse the Poets Pub

Grant Me a Boat

humanist55

For goodness sake
grant me the bucket-list wish
of a boat
any boat will do
a picayune pram
to potter on a large pond
better still a proper rowboat
on a large lake
to drift down the wind lanes
a dry fly bobbing alluringly
on the ripple, gently retrieving
with the dream of a trout rising

A daysailer – better still
ducking the boom
on a dinghy is dodgy
at my age so day trips
on a Summer suitable sea
would fit the bill delightfully
sailing out and back
with the sea breeze
sometimes sleeping
in the cabin after stargazing
at anchor in some sheltering bay

And in the Winter
I would cherish
my little vessel
drawn up on the shore
cleaning and caulking
and laying on varnish
let me leave alliteration behind
and voyage forth
on real wavy waters –
so for goodness sake
one day
grant me a boat

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Written for dVerse Poets Pub which is tonight has Merril Smith ably at the helm as she invites us to Sail into a poem for Poetics…

Parting Prevarication

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Half my sister’s ashes
sit on my bookshelf
the thought flashes regularly
that I must fulfil her wishes
and bury her with our parents
let her out of the camel-shaped teapot
my favourite of her collection
and which bore her back from Ireland
disguising the grey substance
which is, unbelievably, half of her remains.

I think it is the distance to Dorset
which has held me back
from letting the once genial
out of the teapot.
The teapot will remain
ornamentally
on my bookshelf
to use my sister’s sometime sepulchre
to make tea might be
a step too far for a brother
though it would have made his sister
laugh like a drain…

© Andrew Wilson, 2024

Posted on dVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night hosted by Grace.

Frequently the woods…

humanist55

Frequently the wood sare pink
wrote Emily Dickinson, fairly described
as transcendental romantic, I think
was she referencing blossom-time
when gaudy pinks and whites
to win the bees attention fight
that time when we remember
trees are but giant flowering plants
dependent on the tiny pollinator
to close life’s circle with their aerial dance
flowers followed in short order by the clichéd
thousand shades of green
my own favourite time to see
the thin veil delicately drawn
across the Winter-wakened trees
and as the leaves thicken
and take on Summer shades
each tree can be read from a distance
picked out from its companions in the glade

But wait – in Winter too
a palette of subtle colours
also distinguish each species
one from another
colours hard to pin down
from mauves and greys
to blues and nearly brown
and never black except
in solitary silhouette
and frequently the woods are pink

Written for dVerse Poets Pub where  the host is Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Live, OpenLinkNight, Uncategorized

A Cherita

humanist55

A leaf

Engine of photosynthesis
that powers a tree

Turning red in Autumn
filled with anti-freeze
the tree sucks back before the leaf falls

Plucked before this happens
the tree would die
in Winter frost

That is the science
of Fall colour

But not the beauty…

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

Over at dVerse Poets Pub,  Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft challenges us to Cherish the Cherita…