Love and Other Thoughts E-Book

Robert Ferguson

• Herausgeber: novum pro Verlag
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 39

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Do you remember groping after love, that elusive feeling that everyone else seemed to be enjoying, but you couldn't find for yourself? Do you remember the disappointment of rejected or failed love? Are you still surprised by the touch of love for someone else's disaster, emotional, natural or economic? Those memories will inevitably return with these poems. If you thought you had forgotten them, be prepared. They are about to return, in all their beauty and their bite.

Leseprobe

Imprint

All rights of distribution, also through movies, radio and television, photomechanical reproduction, sound carrier, electronic medium and reprinting in excerpts are reserved.

© 2023 novum publishing

ISBN print edition:978-3-99131-907-8

ISBN e-book: 978-3-99131-908-5

Editor:Hugo Chandler, BA

Cover images:Juliakarpyshyn17, Bob Suir, Wirestock | Dreamstime.com

Cover design, layout & typesetting: novum publishing

www.novum-publishing.co.uk

Control

Cooking, we control the changes we impose

On the structure and colour as well as the taste

Of grainsandleaves and roots. We vary nature,

Under deep control.

Medicated, we control the atoms in our blood

By changing chemicals that none of us can see.

Add what is missing, eradicate what grows

That harms us.

Voices pass through wires high up in the air

And under the ground, under careful control.

Messages fly without wires from one to another.

Their transfers are controlled.

But love defies control, grows where it will,

Lifts and depresses everywhere it strikes.

Rules are irrelevant, and must always be,

For love is free.

On a wall in a Saxon church

Who were you? No, not you who is portrayed

But he who drew your face, pinned up the paper,

Pricked it through on plaster wet still

from the apprentice’ trowel,

Joined up the piercings, painted your beloved face.

Or she. Was it a she who wielded pin and brush out of respect

As well as out of love, here in a holy place,

For the remembrance of her devotion and her charity?

Was she alive or dead?

What did her family say? What did they ask, or know?

Was your love secret, masked, hid from their fire?

Or was it shared with them? The face you left, sublime,

Suggests she had sufficient love for everyone.

As the sun sets and shadows grow

Her portrait glows, your colours fresh as when

You brought the pigment-rocks and ground them down

Here by the wall on which your gift was left.

So I must go, but you and she remain,

Always together, always witnessing

What each was to the other.

Always love.

Action this day

You were my first and only love, back then.

When, at the conference, I had had enough

Of being on my own, and now must test

Whether glasses and red hair convicted

Me to single status for the whole of life

I asked you out, and you, between two friends,

Tall, graceful, beautiful, a natural blonde

To my surprise and wonder, you said yes!

How grown-up I was then at just sixteen!

But everything to learn, and much to fail.

Perhaps, since all I knew was Shakespeare’s wit,

Rather than grasped from rude experience,

I was too grown-up, formulaic, stiff,

Bought you those chocolates for the cinema,

Took you to tea one proper afternoon

In the lounge of the best local hotel

I could afford, with sandwiches and cakes,

And pressed too hard to see you every day,

So, with your lovely smile, you had to say,

“But I must wash my hair tonight,” of course.

Did I frustrate and disappoint you? Was that why,

After nine months of kisses, guidance of

My hand occasionally to your breast

And rampant, unproductive, country lust

Which I dared bring to nothing, was that why

You dumped me? “There is someone else”, you smiled,

And I, who should have fought, protested, said

Nothing. I let you go, shocked, shaken, stunned,

And took my medicine bravely, like a man.

I wonder, off and on, remembering you

So very clearly, as the years go by,

How very different life might well have been

If then I had been as mature as you.

Incomparata

When you said it was over, I resigned

Myself. No word would come to mind

To remonstrate, to ask why this must be,

To make you say what I could no-wise see.

I wanted, painfully, to speak my love.

You did not realise I had kept the glove

That you had always worn against the cold

Of winter walks, when I had been so bold

To take your hand, to steal a kiss or two.

Kisses have since been rare, far, far too few,

And none like yours. Hands I have held have felt

No more than paws. My heart will never melt

Again, as it did then, to see your face

Close to my own, raised to its proper place.

Stolen, one New Year

We met by chance. Adjacent seats. Both riled

With indignation at the speech before.

“Coffee?” I said without hope, but you smiled,

Agreed. I did not, could not, hope for more.

In common loneliness, talk came with ease

Until your hair swung as you turned your head

And showed the locket hanging in the crease