Underfoot

Dense sponge soft ground

shifting, almost breathing

compact layers of years’ old autumns

gathered in a hoard

The tender surface is rising to meet my step

in an ancient life-form of peat

and blackish brown

drenched to be more than wet

yet dry as the bracken fold

yielding to my tread

giving over the heavy muskiness

of the wild ponies feet,

I am changed by this,

the mould of time preserved

in forests of sacred trees.

Panic Underfoot at 1:08am

Sleep interrupted,
no, not even started
Panic invaded peace and calm
of a long weekend
working its way into the gentleness
of a sunny morning
There is no chance of 8 hours of sleep now,
maybe 2 (actually 5)
like a virus
seeping into the nighttime
Fear is under foot,
so now there is no sleep
only tired eyes and a racing heart
Under more than just my feet,
under every cell
like blood filling every crack
No I’m not foolish
I only need a hug and a bathrobe
on the road to paradise reborn

Hello everybody,

I am back from London last night!! Still exhausted..I had a wonderful retreat with Jonathan Edwards and six other students in the middle of Cumbria..Mimi couldn’t come because she had a fall and broke her shoulder in three places!!

Michael Laskey came as a mid-week reader and I was thrilled to meet him, too!! He read from his poems..

I have a lot of catching up to do, so I won’t be able to write to last week’s prompt, however appealing it could be,

and here is my little poem for ‘underfoot’..

UNDERFOOT

Doodle for Evenings

I’ve offered 5 dates I think between now and the 16th of June. I’m afraid they are all Tuesdays and Wednesdays as I’m out every other weekday evening and weekends are a bit complicated. If this still doesn’t work for many people, I’ll do a final poll for Sunday evenings or dates later in June.

Have a great Tuesday!

Saying goodbye

A new flight of steps leads up  
between the houses
to a footpath paved with stones
from the beach.
it zigzags up between acres  of flowers.
white and yellow daisies,
as close together as an embrace.
It was here that I left you.

As I turned to leave , a light breeze
lifted you up in a spiral
higher than my head
as if you were saying goodbye
and then you were gone.

I like to think of you walking up,
past the feeding trough
where we watched the sheep,
below the cliff
and up, up, up to the walls
of the ancient town
where we stood all those years ago
looking out to the sea.

WG 4.May 2026

4 May 2026

Heb ‘sgidiau

The Right Hairstyle
 
I have always dreamed of long flowing hair
dark strands that keep growing –
but then up springs a loathing
tedious, constant combing.

I’m a bit behind. I’ve been wanting to write something about this person for a while. It always came out a bit too ratty and earnest. This is hopefully neither.

For god’s sake it was only an apple!

Far worse things have happened at sea
and on this programme. Only last week
that cow Lilith stole Adam’s pajamas
forcing him to sleep commando, he had to
vlog from his bed cave wrapped in his duvet
which sent the ratings through the roof
– obviously – I mean the dude’s a hunk.

So why the fuss over a little theft
it’s not like it was the last one hanging
there’s plenty more out there in the garden
which is now apparently “out of bounds”.
As if that would stop me! I mean seriously
they only picked me for the show because
I’m a rule breaker. They wanted the drama.

Well they’ve certainly got that now!
Apparently, the religious right’s gone bonkers
and even the we’re not atheists we’re agnostics
crowd says I’ve crossed a line.
I don’t regret it if that’s what you think.
It was the damned best apple I’ve eaten in ages
juicy, sweet, succulent, finger-licking

good and a wee bit illicit if you know what I mean?
Rumor has it they’re going to to boot me off.
Let them try bastards I say, let them try!
The public won’t have it. I’m the best thing
on this shit show, without me it’ll be like
watching paint dry. After all Lilith’s a mess
and Adam, while ripper, is a bit of a sheep.

I mean I didn’t even have to persuade him
he was out there in a sec, following me with his
puppy dog eyes, whining away like a wimp
Should we really be doing this E? Are you sure
we won’t get in trouble? I mean what a wanker.
Fit though. Hmm. Oh well, I’ll weather this storm.
Shame that Bloody Mary had to turn up so soon.

Hi, so a few people have filled in the doodles but not everyone. Links are in my last message if you scroll down. I have a question though, would an evening spot work better for more people? I am free most Tuesdays and could probably manage a Wednesday….

Untitled

The voice raised in anger wasn’t mine,
but my mother’s callous tones,
ringing like church bells
out of tune,
out of step
with reality.

Living in the past,
past caring,
past loving,
past the twilight
of a life lived,
but not welcomed.

Will she see the answers before it is too late
to make corrections or accept the hints I’ve given
her before. No, I think not.
Alas, the die is cast.

12th May 2026

https://poets.org/poem/sun-underfoot-among-sundews

That
is not me

although it wears my face, seems
to gesture with my hands towards
a far-too-perfect beach where
waves rush in, abruptly stop
turn back
before they reach
my deepfake feet

who could think this real?
I’ve said for years, insisted
in innumerable speeches
that no mortal creature, even
a monarch such as I,
has power to pause the tides

but
more than a million Follows
an avalanche of Likes
so many eager to believe ‘the facts’
when ‘facts’ are rearranged to suit them

what is a king to do?
how to govern in a world where no-one
leaves their screens for long enough
to come to the water’s edge
and weigh up what is true?

Scandalous!
Women! Most undignified!
Why can’t they just 
polish their hockey sticks  
and be content?
Unheard of in my day!
Scandalous! 
Renowned throughout the world
for their fleetness of foot 
their disregard for hard knocks!

Women should stay in the withdrawing room
or the kitchen according to their station.
Now I hear that 
not content with the benefits
provided by a French governess
they have been admitted
to the inner sanctum and are learning Latin!
When I took the cloth 
I regarded my youthful days with shame 
and have regretted ever since
the day I picked up the ball
and ran with it.

What Dylan Thomas Might Have Told Me In The Pub Last Night

As I nail my theses to the door
I am assailed by those who would attack
me. They say I am heretical
but I cannot stand by and watch
as they slowly destroy all I hold dear.
I am called a grifter, a chancer
but I say I am a grafter. What I do
is for the benefit of others.
Do not mistake the smile
on my face – it’s not there to fool
the public – it is simply a smile
of sheer pleasure when a plan comes
together. I will change the world.
I will make you see the world through
my eyes and you will understand
the lies that others promulgate.
Come with me and we can win – big.

More rant than poem-but I think he would agree!

Expectations not fullfilled

until you return from the moth of night
rich scent of bones to broth
and glasses exact, with froth –
set silver – your table-cloth  

in my mo bile still in Ctete

I’ve followed Helen’s example and tried a sequence of englynion…

Seedlings

Hello friends, I’ve created some doodles to see when would best suit for a poetry reading. Unfortunately, you can now only pick 10 slots with doodle so I had to create a number of separate ones for different time periods. Sorry. I’m also not free a lot at the weekends because of exams and a festival I volunteer at every year. Anyway, if we can’t find something that works for most people in these selections, I’ll try again. I’ve only picked daytime slots but if someone feels evenings would be better please mention it in comments and I’ll do a doodle for evenings, though in my case I think there’s maybe only Tuesdays I can. Too many kids plus choir, the jazz group I sing with and my lovely contemporary dance classes… sorry.

Here are the links :

17-24 May

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/az4jWjZd

25 May – 4 June

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/enm4E1Wd

5 – 10 June

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/dGXqBj8e

After 10 June

https://doodle.com/group-poll/participate/bkj4Aq5a

I am in awe of Patrick’s ability to writing creatively in a second language (and of the other bilingual /multilingual poets in our group!).  And so…

On the Discomfort of Offering a Welsh Form in English

It deserves lines that belong to it, but
my voice is only strong
in one tongue. Forgive this song
syllables right, language wrong.

This is part of my prompt from Poetry Parlor this month. Choose a character from the past, either from myth, history, religion, or literature. Write a poem in their voice, but update their situation to the modern day. 

 David at 100

Applaud years of nurturing, made with love
Not yelling, but showing
Indicating everything
Most are not considering

So I slightly failed at this because I ended up with more than one stanza and some half-rhymes. I think I’ve respected the syllable count and put the rhymes in the right place though.
Etterath

After the month is done, the ink dried
the web of words all spun
you sit with silence, shun
distractions. Time has come

to digest the work begun, hear the truths
you tried to tell. How some
like a bullet bit and stung
tore through fragile, tender skin

down to flesh and blood and bone, shattering
those comforts lately won.
Others, like springtime’s rain run
through you, healing hurts and pain

settling scores one by one, till refreshed
you’ll sift the grit and scum
find the oyster’s midnight sun
ask, is the work ever done?

Oh Patrick you are awesome taking on writing poetry in Welsh. This prompt calls up all my poetry nightmares but here is an offering.

the impossibility of gardening

mypro

my. prompt. the sea
Ian using mobile with a struggle. quite chilly here on coast.

I I am going to bed

night

the sea is like a film of silk

not  a ripple disturbs the surface

the cliffs  close in with the night

the village sleeps.

As I’ve only managed to finish poems for about half the prompts, I’ve not got so many from which to select lines.  I don’t know if that makes the cento harder or easier.  But also, thank you everyone for so many excellent, inspiring prompts, and sorry about those I missed.  All kept to work on in the future even if I failed in April!

Self-cento

Someone had plans
like mouthfuls of sunlight
spring-lush grass
cheerful, restless with curiosity.

Extinguished.
Too long ago, now all I remember
is a quiet life, without blue whales. I find
chores hung on yesterday’s washing line,
used stamps and scraps of string,
some dry scrubby bit of ground
where the tree sags sideways.

I lie in bed and watch the moon
dare not sleep, for what if

it doesn’t end like that?

I don’t know if I tackled with this creative prompt good enough or not..But here it is…

(By the way, I am coming to England on May 8th-this Friday- and will  hopefully return on 18th May. I will be attending a tutored retreat  in Cumbria with Mimi Khalvati with a few other people. I am really excited about this..We will be working on my new pamphlet that I am tryingto finish for some time now.

So, I will miss out next week’s prompt but hopefully can catch up with the writing and comments after my return..

I won’t take my laptop with me. Best wishes to everybody)

THE AFFAIR

Pam

For the pamphlet I will need for you one or more poems to fill two A5 pages.  I will set this in Times New Roman, 12 pt font with margins of about 1 to 0.75 inches.  Your poems do not need to be long but should not be longer than this.

Helen has offered to design us a cover and I have accepted her offer with alacrity.

As before I will send you the two files (the text doc and the cover) for you to print out as many copies as you wish to distribute among friends and family.  I will also send the printing instructions with the documents.  I do not edit your poems so please check before you send them.  I am aware that I’m constantly having to check my own typing and some mistakes slip through.

Please send something you like and would want to share but don’t send anything you might want to submit to magazines or competitions.

Finally my email address is: almira.holmes@zoho.com  – and I suggest NaPoWriMo in the subject heading so the I can identify you poems quickly.

Thank you.

I’m currently taking a creative writing course in Welsh (of course I am!) and amongst other things, we have studied the Englyn. There are eight different types, but this one seems the simplest. It only has one rhyme sound, which chimes throughout the poem.

Line 1 has ten syllables, with a rhyme word near the end of the line -not at the end, but a few syllables before.

Line 2 has six syllables, with a rhyme word at the end.

Lines 3 and 4 have seven syllables each, and both end with a rhyme word.

So:

__________(A)_____ 10

______________(A) 6

________________(A) 7

________________(A) 7

Englyns can be used for any subject: love, humour, a tribute etc., so have fun!

A quick cento. No peace for the wicked, as I now have to look at a poem entitled ‘The Seven Devils’ by Marie How for Poetry Parlor. It looks difficult. Also, many thanks for your poems on my two prompts, One Sentence and Disappearing. I was so impressed by your creativity and enjoyed reading them very much.

Never Finishing
 
Under sunlight today
a beauty I love
so I don’t want to hurry
in this fresh green world,
banks lush, a dark soft lake,
the harmony, uplifting
cheerful and light
as cherry blossom.

But I remember now  the garden
is ankle-deep in weeds and
the cupboards are waiting
for a tidy-up –
a to-do list beckons:
crushes the picturesque.

I feel a bit like the guy who staggers across the finishing line of a marathon three days late, dressed as something fanciful. What the Self-Cento does is to take you back through the month, day by day, the poems you are happy with and the ones you’d rather forget! Whilst I clearly worked on a few themes, this doesn’t really hang together -it’s a Frankenstein’s monster of a poem, but hey, what of it?

30.4.2026 Self-Cento

April Chaos to Calm

It was all gone by the next day
to steer me in the right direction.
Just breathing deeply.
Almost all gathered together
that the truth comes freely
The sun is all bright,
Only one business has been rebuilt,
A tiny church covered in cup fragments—
see the National Portrait Gallery—
so alone.
Spectacular remnants of glaciation
sit easily accessible, constant reminder of a time
Even though the world is in turmoil,
masking red maples.
One very tall thirty-year-old spruce
and your reflection is hollow and sad,
began by winning a prize.
Walk from house to house
beside the Fraser River
among the giant cedars in the graveyard,
breathe in the flow of receding tides
We like to think so.
Then before you know it, the final siren signals that hostility
or mushrooms, peppers, and onion
of what I don’t remember.
As we cross the Fraser for second time,
all that’s needed now is sun and warmth with
your path as you see it. Your sisters are here to help you
Even though it makes no sense.

Hi guys, I realised I didn’t suggest a reading this year. Only because I’ve been away a lot and busy. If anyone thinks that a zoom poetry reading is still something they’d like to do I can make a doodle and we can see what would work for people in terms of dates and times.

I can’t believe we came to the end of this April writing madness! It passed very quickly…

FRAGMENTS FROM LIFE

He Needs To Know

tick off the corners and alleyways
to tramp the chalk contours
and the resonance of wind-chill

guide you, the wild garlic beneath a beech-brightening
light of a darkened room, loose colour becomes
the sun through the windscreen

huddling a muffler of pale cerise
detritus and the remains
of residual energy

a slice of cake, or
in the acrid, bitter blackness of coffee
so consequent, to our stories

the one he did not look
to take into account
the brittle waste of summer

trees, filling with this length of days
almost as if I imagined her voice
of carefully folded kisses

cherries, cheese and vermouth, maybe
one slow shift at a time
is just its space here today

she would tell him, that

I’m posting now, I’ve got a busy evening. I have 29 poems to take another look at over the next few weeks, months, years… I have added nothing but I may have tweaked a pronoun. The title is from day one’s poem.

I’ve only so many fucks left to give

I find the tank is empty, the machinery défaillant
driving west to where the end of this continent
waits to sing me to sleep or just hold me
my spare-tire love handles, my posse of witches
even my darkest, unseen parts, my acts of love.

The cold, like tiny needles pricking my skin
this whole life like the burst of laughter after a joke.
An unraveling of long held sadness. Wait I say
but you are far away, drifting on the wind like milkweed seeds.

A bear’s armour is his soul
singing in the garden when the edges of the self flutter
like when you wake in the night and it’s pitch black
and your lover gifts you poetic crumbs, dime a dozen
when you’d believed you might die.

And still in the midst of darkness –
never forget you are an animal first. Sometimes
the whole of eternity might be a picnic under the stars
your toes in the Atlantic, an apple tree’s blossom
the pattern of leaves dancing on the ground.

And perhaps
what I really mean to say, is there are words for this
even when we are too broken to articulate.

Oh dear, it’s the 30th – 2 days behind not to mention the big gap in the middle…  Back to comment shortly.

Someone
is taking on the empty shop
it is a family of Romanians it is
Bert’s brother it is two spinsters
moving here from Dorset

someone has plans
to change the shop into a bakery
or into flats  a tattoo parlour
another chippie

it will be a laundrette or a salon
for grooming dogs or a cafe
it will definitely become offices
for the new local MP

when someone eventually arrives
to end the speculation
what on earth will we all do
for conversation?

April dream (or should it be nightmare)

People are doing silly things
like this. I will have bananas and sports
and chocolate sponge in the Tupperware.

Go with the flow for an hour or two.
Clean – allowing me to clear the flotsam.

First it’s the daughter.
No, she says, I thought perhaps
he plays the game with marbles.

They were fighting over who
may be a gentle boy and not,
surprisingly, the answer was yes.

When visiting his boring school friend,
Einstein says time varies depending on where
the first cut of grass
is focused; on distant birds perhaps or
being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Be patient.

She knows what it feels like to hear
someone wants to make contact.
He lies hidden in river water,
with the elite men but following. There are so many
I cancelled a class I was due to do on the Monday,
the night before she fell into a coma.

They are floating,
more often they are forgotten, known
in the safe place. Yes, that one, the upstairs room.

This is outrageous of me but I have written a short Cento out of the four poems I posted this month and a line from an ekphratic poem from ages ago. Talk about not labouring in the vineyard through the heat of the day and I have no excuse.

Cento 2026

Near the beginning of the month there was a prompt to write short poems on small photos which I thought was one of the great prompts. So here they are

Reflections on Family