by A. O. Griffiths
By Charmaine J Clark
Can you see the tiger in the train
Nibbling on a Theban curiosity?
A polar bear snug at the buffet
Eating a plate of cray-fish?
Can you see the mad images?
Dagger and smile in a yellowed eye,
Hat and coat and carriage
In a world of frenzied clockwork.
“The old fool's drifting.”
Caught in a world of purple,
Candlesticks and foxgloves marching with umbrellas,
Minstrels clad in button-holes,
All beetroot eyed
And fingers made of rhubarb,
Walking down a massive plastic drain-pipe,
Purple as an overloaded vein.
“It can't be long.”
A song erupts from a choir of snakes,
The apples dance,
The bluebells wake
And shriek abusive slogans
At a throng of thistles.
The water from a distant lake
Dissolves the earth
And forms a cloud to be devoured
By a giant's mouth.
“I think he's gone.”
A seal swims in the doldrum sea
Until it touches land
And turns, on a cusp as yet unseen by man,
Into a maiden,
Wet with beauty,
Smiling sunset in the sand.
She turns, encased in legend's trance,
To place chance songs
Upon an ocean's breeze.
“Come follow, follow,” sings the maid
In a crystal voice,
A tone defying nature's choices,
To entice.
Then she is gone and a sailor's ear
Hears softly, in the cliff-side shadow,
Her witching song,
“Come here, come here.”
He follows in the alcohol,
Drunk ecstasy of expectation,
‘Till he finds nothing but a set of steps
And echoes falling to the sea.
The environment is harsh,
A dried-up marshland
With an ever thirsty hue,
A clue to some Egyptian puzzle
In the hieroglyphic cracking.
Is there great life here?
I wonder if a tear,
Dropped with care upon the wizened earth,
Would bring conception?
A split response of glorious rebirth
To exhale foliage.
This is a mystery,
A past whose possible Kaleidoscope
Remains as potent as the future;
Hope, where tears falling
Seek the seed in answer to the calling
Of a thirst.
By Charmaine J Clark
I woke, amidst the ices of a new world!
Then, I was covered in fur and cloven hoofed.
The experience of humanity was yet to come,
developing, was happening, even in ancient lands.
When I had journeyed to the worn lanes of London ,
there I learnt to live a measly life, with gangs,
torment and thuggery maintained that level of being.
My age was celebrated on the icy Steppes of Russia,
It was when the Chernobyl disaster was bridling humanity,
as usual, our race lost, power won out.
I was wed at a bistro site in the 20's in down town New York .
The bliss of a honeymoon in native Brazil , and rapturous tangos.
It was a wedding of diverse consequences, leading to global:-
I gave birth to many children in the centre of soulful Sydney .
I don't know how my family spread around the world so fast,
but I had a related reunion with the spiritualism of gay Paree.
I lay in my deathbed on the used shores of old Africa .
There, I had been bemused by tribal leaders, and witchdoctors,
tormented by mosquitoes, and remembering my chronology.
Time had turned, the ages had passed through me
and I was buried where I originated, under the ice.