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

Window

The day is grey and overcoat
so I fold an ‘extra layer’ into my bag
along with my bins
and the map I only take out of habit
to tramp the chalk contours
of the Downs.
It’s at a moment like this
my mind flicks
from kettle to bramble, settling
thought on the ’and-click’ of a gate,
the shape of a barn, grass
sodden, sheep in a field of turnips
before returning
to this muffle-moist of weather
and a chance to stare

What I Said Isn’t What I Meant

I tried
I cried
I meant to say
I lied

You gripped
You flipped
You meant to say
You slipped

Who’s to say the word I said
Is not the word I meant
Even though it makes no sense
In this context
On this continent
I am content
I tried

What Are You Going To Do Today

in a world of many someones
it’s easy to think one doesn’t signify
 
so step out – from a front door
and confront those tiny actions:

the car at speed (in spite of potholes)
a curl of turd on the pavement

or fly-tipped paint – the nameless
you can either choose

to entitle – or keep away from
a homeward bag-for-life of story

I’ve accidentally written two poems so I’m sending them both because I can’t pick. My apologies for the length. I took inspiration from Patrick and Billy with the very long title for the first one. The second has a little bit of truth weaved in to it but only a very little (sorry I’ve never dated another poet, my husband is a computer scientist 😂) but the moment on the fjord really happened to me. And the man knowing better than me, a lowly woman, I have also sadly experienced repeatedly though thankfully not here from the wonderful chaps in this group. And a nod to our favorite fruit poem.

I think he meant to say climatic in the long boring talk about weather patterns and cloud formations and the need to wake up to the urgency of the climate crisis. 

I think he meant to say climatic but we all woke up when his glottal made a slip and instead he said climactic. The word rang out loud and clear and what began as a smattering of snickering quickly spread, till the whole lecture theatre was sniggering into their fists. We should have known better. We should have shown more respect. It’s not even that funny a mistake. It’s not like he said a rude word. It’s not like what he was saying wasn’t important. But he just happened to throw climaxing into the conversation in a room full of late adolescents and young adults, on a hot sticky day as stale deodorant scent hung in the air and people who’d stayed up too late the night before drinking tried to remain awake. He said it in the middle of an endless speech, that employed far too many technical terms to engage attention while the drone of the industrial air-conditioning units hummed behind and that lone but noisy fly kept buzzing towards the one open window and then peeling away just as it might have made its bid for freedom. And isn’t it strange how flies so often do that? The funny thing is, he didn’t stop. Didn’t even acknowledge his mistake. Or the laughter spreading round the room like wildfire. He just ploughed on. Though I do recall the tips of his ears went red. As if they had been dipped in lipstick or paint. As if his body could acknowledge what his mind could not.

The moment we turn 

I glove you , you say and I wonder if it is just
a slip of the tongue  or if you realised mid-sentence
what you were about to confess and about turned.
I mean being a poet you know a lot about voltas
and also about keeping things vague . And later
after I’ve pretended I hadn’t heard you at all
and turned the conversation to other thoughts
when we are lying together in your narrow bed
and the space between us is a fault line
waiting for one or the other of us to shift
the silence simmering like hot lava under the crust
I think, maybe this is the last time we will lie together
side by side like this. Because now you have
not said it, it will always be between us.
And what a pain in the ass that is because before
we were getting along just fine. And then I am
flashing back years before, to a day on the fjord when
another boy I used to love took back those words too.
And I wonder if it is something about me that makes
men change their minds, if I am just too prickly to love?
Or if it is them that are too broken to articulate
what they really feel, what they really want?
And when finally I crack and I call you out
for what you almost, not quite, practically said
you laugh it off and say it was a joke. Or that maybe
I imagined it because you would never mix up love
and glove after all you are a poet and poet’s know
a lot about words.  And it is like that time you ate
all the plums and I came home my mouth salivating
with the dream of the taste of them on my tongue
and was so disappointed to find them all gone
but you made me see It like it was my fault. Like
if I’d wanted to save them I should have left a note
even though they were my plums. In my icebox.

Typical-late with my own prompt, but in my defence this is a poem about what I spent Monday doing.

The Impossibility of Birding

Oops!

We were pen-friends 
from the age of 13
Her English was better than my French..
Now we share photographs
of our grandchildren
already  adults themselves.
 She has the advantage 
of an ex-English teacher husband.
For years I ssigned my letters
with B’on baisers’
Until she told me what it meant.

Embarrassing

Yes, I do know the difference
so why does my brain hoodwink my tongue
to say “conversation” when I mean “conservation”.
And I recall the mortifying moment when –
in deep conversation with my intellectual cousin,
a Doctor of Science,
about current conservation projects –
my ears heard my voice uttering
                                                          “conversation”.

Mugger crocodile

he lies hidden in river water
waiting for an unsuspecting
elderly lady carrying her precious
handbag which he plans to steal.
He doesn’t mind what her bag
is made of, he is interested in any
and all. Is it the bag or its contents
that intrigues him, is the question
we all want to know the answer to?
Scientists are working to this end
and, we understand, a Nobel Prize
is the objective of their studies.
Be careful if you are elderly, a lady
or merely walking along a river.

Someone once said I looked like the Mona Lisa

I was a lot younger then, my jawline hadn’t dipped
and my cheekbones were more present. And I thought it
a much better compliment than when someone said
I looked like the Schtroumpfette. Though now I think
I was wrong because after all besides being blue
she is beautiful and all the Schtroumpfs want to date her.
And really the Mona Lisa is a bit pasty and dare I whisper
from certain angles, a little bit crosseyed. And perhaps
what he meant when he said those words was really
you look enigmatic, like a mystery I’d like to solve
and maybe it was just a line, but really it was true.
And I don’t need him to tell me I have secrets or even
that if you peeled me, right down to the bone marrow
I would be blue. I know that to be so.

Pauline

She is just another someone whose photograph
is posted on the Funeral Director’s website.
I count myself lucky to have known her
for endless years. Now she peers at me
from the screen with the same mischievous smile
and I know I will miss her sturdy sweetness,
non-stop chatter, the musicality of her laughter,
and, of course, the unbuttoned gossip. And I can’t help
thinking this is another patterned wall
flattened in my house of life.

I tried to write about a Freudian slip..It is still inspired by the prompt..

AN INCIDENT

This doesn’t follow the prompt although it grew from it; I was going to substitute ‘perspex’ for every ‘per’ word, but although that would allow for a certain transparency, it would make a nonsense of meaning -which might have been the original idea, of course!

29.4.2026 As Per The Book

A Note for Charlotte

You sat next to me on the Yonge Street subway going north,
gabbing with a fellow student about classes and friends
and the future that seemed beyond understanding at that time.
Excuse me for interrupting, but I just have to say
these words to you, now as I’m reminded of my own experience
of that age and that time in my life. You won’t want to listen
to some oldie right now, but you will later, so I’ll pass on
this wisdom of my years.

Don’t rush through life blinded by gadgets and so-called
‘best buds’ who don’t have your best interests at heart.
You have time to see the whole world and make new friends.
Play that sonata, cry through that aria, embrace that minor chord.
Don’t waste your life and take that first scary step when you need to.
Don’t wait until conditions are right, ‘cause they’ll never be anywhere close.

Talk to someone who you trust about your dreams, your fears, and
your path as you see it. Your sisters are here to help you
expand,
enfold,
explore.

Day 27?Green
an experimebt
green peppers, 
Greengages
Green grows the willow-o

,  greeny-yellowy
Green  eyes
 under  the greenwood trees-o.

Green  as grass,
 green leaves
Green shoots of spring-o

Green fingers
gree with envy! 
Green fields of home-o

WG

(An experiment )

Some one yo watch
the dawning of a new day
to promise that the sun  
will shine
over me.
Someone came knocking
to wake the morning
to calm the beating
at my wee small 
heart.

Thanks to  George Gershwin and Walter de la Mere

SO sorry to miss most of April. Hope you’ve been having fun.

Please, could someone remind me what Day 30 is? It is a form using April poems writ….perhaps I can enter even with the very few I’ve writ. V v best to all from the start of my 80th year (no use defying it Pam) P xx xx ❤️

Need to come up with a title

someone wants to make contact
someone is far away

someone needs to speak to you
someone never says a word

someone is very shy
someone has laryngitis

someone tells you to go away
someone says I didn’t mean it

someone can’t let go
someone else can’t stay

someone holds your hand
someone says I love you

Write a poem in any style of any length which involves a mistaken word eg on predictive text, typing ‘hotbin’ and getting ‘hobbit’ eg if you are dyslexic and you read the name of a board game which is ‘Balderdash’ as ‘Bladderdash’. Use these examples or think up your own.

2d Grey-green and carmine – SG227

The King Edward shades are difficult to determine.
Consider first whether they have lost intensity
through immersion in water (note: purples and greens
are particularly susceptible) or have been printed
not on ordinary, but chalk-surfaced paper.
Remember, subtle variation cannot be seen in the false
light of a darkened room, loose colour becomes
confined – so the recommended eye is naked,
natural, daytime and setting foot out-of-doors.  

This is not dissimilar to the disordered collection
of concerns and worries you ought to examine  
in the cold winds of the downs, where with flint
step, the constant flaw of relationship can be given
value in any denomination. You should let the simple
typography of the celandine and anemone
guide you, the wild garlic beneath a beech-brightening
wood be your reference and the rowan that will one day
become a deep dull green, almost vermillion.

I’m catching up again, but then it was my birthday yesterday…

I’m rather taken with the way Billy Collins writes improbably long titles for his poems. Can you tell? 🙂

27.4.2026 Looking Back At The Photograph I Used As My Zoom Background During Lockdown

Dan Evan’s ram
is out again
been seen at the bus stop
grazing

fifth time this week
caught in the graveyard
then the village wildflower patch
also the gardens
of the Harrisons, and Mrs Cox

You’d think Dan Evan’s ram
would love his own fine field
spring-lush, some Jacobs sheep
for company

but every night
he’s out
the grass may not be greener
somewhere else, but then again
it might

Again a very open-ended  and beautiful prompt…

A PORTRAIT

28.4.2026 Someone

This is so not done but I’ve been having fun playing and I need to move on now. Definitely one I’ll come back to next month. It’s a riff on the ideas of the song It’s not easy bein’ green, oh yes the great Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog. A beloved favorite of mine. In fact you can sing the whole thing to the tune if that tickles your fancy. I don’t have a title yet other than just Green.

Green

In this world of high-rise flats and lights
this world of concrete slabs of grey
this brutal, modern, intercity dream
it’s not easy to be green, to be alive,
to breathe, to flower and to grow.

It can be lonely without friends.
Isolated in your individual plantation plot.
Surrounded by the city’s manmade sights
and sounds and smells and numbness to pain.
People seem to pass you by blind

never really seeing the colour of your foliage
or hearing the way you murmur in the breeze.
Do they even know you have a circulatory system just like theirs
that you turn the carbon in the air into the oxygen they breathe?
But in the Springtime somehow they all come alive

as you bloom in lime and shades of olive and chartreuse
when flowers blossom in your lofty boughs
like traffic lights gone soft, their signals blooming
Or paper lanterns strung up for a fete, everyone forgot.
Then, their bodies seem to wake as if from sleep –

and their smiles are like sequins on a dancer twirling in the dark.
And the thought-balloons that sail up from their minds
are full of dreams of summer days and swimming in the sea
and strawberry kisses and even mosquitos and nights spent sleeping
under the milky-way counting the stars as they blink on and off.

Then I remember how much I love to people watch
and how that one time a little boy spent a whole day up in my arms
watching the patterns of my leaves dance around on the ground
and that one old wrinkled man who put his arms around me
and said he loved me and was grateful for the shade I gave.

In this world of high-rise flats and grey
of concrete slabs and brutal modern life
it may not be easy being green
and not human and in charge of the way things are done
but in the end I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So Much Green
 
Outside the window,
trees, hedgerows are lighting up
the neighbourhood with green.
And I don’t wish for time to hurry
this fresh green world into
the richer tones of summer,
every gilded hue of autumn
and the impeccable nakedness
after the first bitter winds of winter.

Hopes for Fresh Veg

Zucchini, carrots, peas, and squash are spaced out
in the garden plot. Watered with last night’s rain,
the raised area is covered so the crows and
starlings leave the newly sprouting seedlings alone.

Tomatoes hang upside down with mint and arugula
adjacent to fill the air with scent, homemade pasta sauce and
mojitos penciled in for later in the season. Small, mint green
berries appear overnight in cup-like strawberry fields.

All that’s needed now is sun and warmth with
intermittent rain plus attentive garden personnel
to weed and feed the darlings growing strong with
many happy thoughts of late summer’s plentiful harvest.

I am posting  this for  Maureen

Missing

Often, arriving back on leave
you’d walk in, say carpet!

as if the luxury of it
was utterly unfamiliar
as if you had not quite remembered
home was a place
with coverings on the floor

carpet!  it made me laugh each time
that slight surprise, your pleasure
although I saw
how soft the house must seem
against your other world
of steel walls and scarred linoleum

well, I’ve not travelled far enough
to miss the carpet
but even so I’m glad to be back home
I like the place, its peace, its space, I like
the echo of you
in every room.

An Alpine Walk
 
That June day in Switzerland, when we walked up a steep, twisting path dressed in shorts and a
t-shirt, and thrust our arms into the strata of snow edging the path to keep cool. To remember the pleasure of being alive to bathe in the beauty of the mountains tethered to the sky, the spirals of flamboyant flowers piercing patches of green. And the surprise when we reached the lake
to see the picturesque blue, catching the eye, in the brochure, still veiled by ice. A prize driven by
the fate of a long Winter.

Full force of beauty,
summer and winter connect.
Fingers caress snow.

GREEN AXE

Somebody said today something about the beauty of making mistakes, so I wrote a poem incorporating green into this…

The open-endedness of the prompt was also very inspiring!

I’m not happy with my haiku but I need to move on to green. Thank you for all your home away poems they were great. We are rich my friends, deeply so.

I ache for Home
 
Home. I miss it in my bones. I miss the yellow curtains and the yellow chair. I miss the blushing lilac in bloom and the dozens of inky purple bearded iris just outside the window. I miss my cats of course and my children. And the apple tree with its white confetti blossom drifting on the breeze. But I even miss our horrid nineteen-seventies brown bathroom, dripping with wet washing. And the kitchen tiles and the dated splashback and the wooden paneled ceiling we’re too lazy to paint and to tight to pay someone else to. I miss the laundry undoubtedly piled on the sofa and the sound of teenagers shouting for missing sports shirts and German homework, for misplaced musical instruments and the other half of uncoupled socks. I miss it all, the crazy and the calm, this somehow cosy chaos.

It’s not perfection
that makes us content, rather
a home with a heart.

Travel solo 

At what time in my trip across the country, will I regret that I left home? At the bottom of the driveway, where I stop and race inside to get a hat. At red light leaving the subdivision, when the learner in front fails to turn the corner fast enough and almost gets clipped by a spending Audi. As we cross the Fraser for second time and merge successfully behind the tractor trailer. When you drop me at Departures after yelling at the taxi who cut you off. Just before the toddler started to scream in the security line (and I pray he’s not on my flight). While I stare across the tarmac, sitting in lounge, slipping a glass of chardonnay, and hoping you made it home okay. When I finish watching my second romantic comedy, turn off the overhead light, to have nap. I should have got my mother babysit for a few days and asked you to come along on my business trip, but you’d have been bored. Right?

Twice you said to go
We’ll be fine, don’t worry now
I wish you were here

Hi folks . Today’s prompt is the colour Green.

Green politics/environmental matters: Green clothes or things: plants: jealousy: shades of. Any form. Enjoy

26.4.2026 Let’s Head West

Going home

It feels like going home.
We searched the maps for hidden lanes
through mountain pass to ancient sites
and villages where we might find
a meal, a welcome bed after the miles.
The folk we met greeted us like friends,
like family returned after long years away.

I know it’s changed,
 the old ones now are long since in their graves
the younger moved away, but some remain
and those I long to see again.. I’ll leave the city,
take a country bus, a boat to tiny villages
along the coast, stay there a night or two
enough to say hello, I’ve missed you but I”m back. 

WG</

I lived in Blackheath a short walk away from the Marathon start and would like to think that if I still had access to the house I just might have trained and run the Marathon. I like the list form of poem.

London Marathon – 26th April 2026

the small bomb craters have been filled
and the heath is smooth and safe where
they gather for the race: wheelchair racers –
the park gates were where the masses gathered –
elite women and elite men – beside the park gates
the house where the park-keeper lived and possibly
this is where my father went the evening he
was locked in the park – the masses will go
with the elite men but following, there are so many,
which is maybe why they don’t file through the gates
any more – a little further round to the left as you
go in you will see the Observatory – now moved
to where the night sky is clearer, darker – and there
on the wall is the twenty-four clock as well as
the metal strip that marks the Prime Meridian
and people stand, one foot on either side, to have photos
taken – any minute now the buzzer will sound
for the start of the race – perhaps the park-keeper
had the evening off and went out to dinner and did
my father sleep in the park, on the bandstand maybe –
but then the race begins to make its way through
the streets and towards the tea clipper, Cutty Sark,
the fastest ship of her time, and on to parts of the city
you never knew then because you moved away –
in the race today records will be broken –
you can never go back, taking your daughter to be
photographed with a squirrel being told to keep off the grass