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Tony Turner ( - 2013) The universe is mostly empty space The atom’s void round which electrons race
Electrons go right through a metal foil And stars are only gases on the boil
And mass is really energy held tight While energy is coiled in strings of light.
Now time depends upon your point of view So in the tenth dimension all is new
The world is just an insubstantial dream And things are not as solid as they seem.
Why should a Being cleverer by far Love artefacts as fragile as we are?
So hold me close as north winds fill with snow For time is short and that is all we know.
From contemplation in the orange garden to a hushed gloom where light hangs in bowls like censers, spills over an astonishment of arches in white and red stretching to infinity on a history of classic pillars. We are enveloped in Moorishness, dwarfed by starry domes that seem to float on filigree. Drawn by the distant light of the holy Mihrab, we move on, under confusions of horseshoe and multi-lobed arches upon arches, reaching for a vision of holiness. We round a pillar glimpse the face of some Renaissance Pope, like a mirage. Another arch, and never having found a door we’re suddenly in a Christian nave of soaring gothic tracery. Brick fuses with stone east with west Moor with Christian, as lover with lover, sharing this holy ground.
Under his black patka, his soft brown eyes are thoughtful, rehearsing what must be done. He twirls the ball in the fingers of his left repeatedly spins it to his right.
Then, three short paces breaks into a run body, rocking back, swings round his planted foot rotating as the ball snaps from his fingers, loops, drifts away a little.
Chanderpaul, seventy-four runs secure, judges there’s no danger, makes no move to play it. Spin bites, ball breaks back at speed strikes him on the pad.
Monty’s arm is up, his shout’s insistent, eyes appealing. Up goes the umpire’s finger and off goes Monty like a fire-cracker, a jumping jack exploding into air, landing and springing off again in new surprise directions.
The team catch fire with him, ignition spreads from man to man crosses the long space to the boundary leaps the fence and lights the crowd, spreads like a brush fire
so that, when the moment comes off its high point, as it must, there’s a buzz everywhere and people returning to their seats can feel the warmth of sharing a moment with Monty.
Tony Turner In collection Dreams And Sudden Dangers, 2009 Cherrycroft Press, ISBN 978-0-9532900-9-3
The sun throws shadows of the hill behind far into the estuary, but lingers on the other shore picking out amber sand, rows of neat blue boats pushed high up the beach against the possibility of storm, and a white house with blue shutters. At its anchorage, a yacht is being secured for the night. A bird flies low along the estuary towards the sea. A dark bird, following the shoreline, going home. I try to name it, in an idle way, and suddenly I notice that it’s blue. I fix it, testing its blueness with each beat until it disappears. Pondering this I see another bird and it looks blue and others, dipping in the shadow of our hill, are blue and blue and blue as lights come on tracing a pathway from yacht to house and on up the far hillside into the luminous azure of the darkening sky, to the first stars and all the vast blueness of the universe beyond.
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