Egret

Perhaps a hundred metres from my feet
Some ragged poplars mark a pleasant stream
Where we would loiter, were you here to dream
With me, repaint the curdling, broken cream
Of shattered clouds. My world would be complete
 
Again. I lie spread-eagled in tall weeds
Where once the vines like soldiers stoutly stood,
Where children pruned and shaped them as they should,
Where farmers came and saw that they were good,
Where once the harrowed fields were cast with seeds.
 
A heron rises from the stream against the sky,
Silhouetted black against the light;
She soars towards our hill, majestic sight –
Against the green I see that she is white,
An egret, a robed angel to my eye.
 
And she is you, raised from the river’s shade
By Destiny, I muse. I watch her shrink,
A dancing petal at horizon’s brink,
And go. Yes, that was you, was you, I think,
Dissolved, like all the happy world we made.
 
Oh have you found a magic place, white bird?
Are there lilies on your pond, my dearest one?
And do you perch on rocks beneath the sun,
Remembering our chatter and our fun?
I would die for just a single word.
 

Bill Homewood

in collection Painting with Words, 2021, Mimosa Books/KDP,
ISBN 979-8-71184333-0-6

 
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In Your Eyes

We turn the telly off. The man’s uncouth.
But undissembling speech comes from the copse
Across the lawns, where simple, mighty truth
Is bleated by a tiny, shock-eyed scops,
An owl, his sermon half a second long,
More eloquent than presidents and kings
And sheikhs and ministers, a level song
Of stilled integrity, of deeper things
Than boasting demagogues can say or write;
And Veritas, goddess of all that’s true,
Is entertaining us this new-born night.
We listen. Silence. Then I look at you.
     You smile at me. In you there are no lies.
     The truth is in the night, and in your eyes.
 

Bill Homewood

in collection Painting with Words, 2021, Mimosa Books/KDP,
ISBN 979-8-71184333-0-6

 
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Sonnet for a Snowdrop
(Galanthus Nivalis – Milkflower of the Snow)

I knelt to pick a posy, tiny gems
In wedding group beneath the guardian blades
Of woodland grass and looming crocus stems –
For all the world, I thought, fairy bridesmaids.
 
I gave you them, each dainty, treasured bell;
You dipped to breathe the perfume on your palm
And as you did so one detached and fell.
The scent of Spring that heralds Summer’s balm
 
Rose from my hand as I retrieved the jewel –
A pure reproach for all the wrongs we’ve done,
Our blasted greed, our soiled planet, cruel
Truth: we’re guilty, every bloody one.
 
     Her innocence a judgement, true and grand,
     I felt I held the cosmos in my hand.
 

Bill Homewood

in collection Painting with Words, 2021, Mimosa Books/KDP,
ISBN 979-8-71184333-0-6

 
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Burnt Umber

There had been a million shadows.
Uncountable curves and darkling dunes
Formed him, grey crannies he filled,
Curled into tenebrous, cloistering prisons,
Guises he posed in, easy dreams
To explore and sometimes briefly enact;
 
Say, the intoxicating pursuit of perfection:
The first woman who loved him naked,
Encircling herself, encircling him, the moment
Feral, perfect, the boy a free man as he shared
His den; she spilled love as warm rain
In a summer storm makes the night glad.
 
Those long-ago initiations were art,
Those flanks, clefts, shadows, those peaks,
Those purses, those parcels of soft promise –
Treasures the painter shaped perfectly
Even as his rebel rigger brush went rogue
And found longings, the pull of indiscretion
 
In a dingle or dip, a deep-dimpled elbow,
A coded offering of depth and reception
Or lure for a touch of, of, of – terra d’ombra?
Now! There! Yes! For the ultimate gift,
For the ultimate loss, for the dying,
For the burial, for the ultimate shadow.
 

Bill Homewood

in collection Painting with Words, 2021, Mimosa Books/KDP,
ISBN 979-8-71184333-0-6

 
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