Tuesday poem: Passing Beauty from Boots
August 22, 2017
Passing beauty
It’s moving, just ahead
of the player’s most clever feet.
Every four years, we fill a cup,
then pour it out, a month of dreams.
Was it just last week that Bergkamp
flicked with orange elegance,
side-footing space and time?
No, he is long gone now,
off fielding fifty years.
Others follow. Messy time
melts beauty, remoulds it,
casts it always anew.
It never ages, constantly fired,
as we fade, we watchers,
yesterday’s players, passing.
Twenty sips at the cup
will fill a lifetime;
held safe in keeper’s hands.
PS Cottier
This poem was just republished in Boots:A Selections of Football Poetry 1890-2017, edited by Mark Pirie of New Zealand. As Mark has it up as an sample from the book, I thought I would also republish it here. It was first published in Eureka Street here in Australia.
The book contains poems from New Zealand, England, France and the Netherlands, with New Zealand being the home of most. It is well worth reading for the diversity of approaches: biographical, political, elegiac (mine, for once!) humorous and historical. A lovely present for anyone interested in football.
It can be ordered through Lulu through the publisher’s website (HeadworX Publishers). Boots is an expanded edition of a previous collection first published in 2014.
Tuesday Poem: Up
February 15, 2016
Up
To look up from cracks
to see two joined
fifty years by love,
cemented into couple,
completed by time;
To feel sudden sun’s lick
render you gerbera,
face stroked by light petal
eight minutes old
caressed by time;
To see dog raise hairy flag
of flesh and wag
a fan in smell-poem air,
simple and clear,
careless of time;
is joy.
P.S. Cottier
I wrote this ages ago and can’t remember if it’s been published. Not on My List, so probably not! (My List is all the publications and awards I’ve had, and is a kind of memoir. But listier and with rather less angst.)
A simple poem with a bit of repetition for those who like that sort of thing. The dog in the photo likes the same line of poetry being thrown out again and again. We’d call it a stick.
Click this link to see which poets are posting on Tuesdays.
Tuesday poem: Ammonite
September 10, 2012
Ammonite
Stony rose blooms from centre, soft thorns of feelers long since lost.
Aeons before any bee roamed from flower to flower, fields of round shells
pumped through seas, curled rams horns butting at white choppy waves.
Now round-eyed fossil stares at me from my desk, surprised to see
one so pink, so soft, so new. Soil frozen bubble reminds that our kind
is also a wink in time’s long receipt; a mere fingerprint of bone will
one day remain, hardened into artefact like ammonite, to be mined
and grasped (if the finders should have hands). Old cockle swirl,
ridge-back, cocks a snook at certitude; oceans of twisting time
sound through mud-filled shofar, airless conch, a mazy call of years.
P.S. Cottier
Having returned, very tired, from the Poets Train last night, I’ll recycle this old, though as yet unpublished, poem and give a more train-specific post when I’m back to my routine. Or timetable.
Suffice to say that many words have passed these lips over the weekend!
Click this feather and see if any more poems are dealing with ancient creatures:
There’s one terrific poem about robots on Tim Jones’s blog. Take my word for it…
Dangerous ground
October 28, 2011
It’s so hard to write about love without being sucked into the great swamp of cliché. (That swamp is just near the level playing field and the field of dreams, incidentally.) Here’s a poem that attempts to avoid the swamp.
I’ve totally given up trying to make my poems copied onto here revert to single spacing; they just like to be double spaced. And who am I to argue with the muse of the computer?
Love
Dangerous ground, they say; thick sands
tending towards the gluggy, or cloying
like dessert wine, just too too sweet.
Roll it round your tongue and spit!
say the many, divorced from lingering,
an evicted dog’s cold fleas, itching.
But that is not it, that is not it at all.
I realise that now, tottering past forty,
smorgasbord stashed in past’s
crumbed pantry of regret.
Hungover with experiment,
trapezed into performance,
the gourmet becomes gourmand
or abstemes self into shape.
But the shape of love is not six-packed muscle,
nor even delicate lines of balletic grace.
Love is a vegetarian at the butcher’s,
gapes of bed-socks beneath ageing dreams
and the practised caress;
an ideolect of touch and lapping
curled like a cat in memory’s ample gut.
Stretching, it rubs against the legs of so far and thus good.
Then it stalks out into future’s thin twilight, hunting for self,
in the deep dear shadows of the you and the now.
P.S. Cottier
PS Cottier 