Best Regrowth Poems
(An Addingham poem)
‘There! Where every curve
injects another memory.’
Analytic beauty that
nestled in verdant valley
allows the mind to review,
where archaic dry-stone walls
enhance the ancestral ghosts,
impeccable trees, nature’s
guardian to one’s heady days,
inscribed when lovers called.
Now historic brows lost
within the village face,
expressive meadows
from a bygone age did
grace now lay in waste,
every thistle upon
throstle nest cut down
and stone barns redundant.
For cement and brick
replace the gathering blooms,
fertile soil lay under macadam
and house numbers
supersede the hawthorn hedge,
and old ‘Bram’ on horse and cart
daily down moor lane
long gone and dead.
Oh. Them old manifestations
embedded, the labour
of many a village son,
where leaf and wood
do part but once a year,
after seasons of regrowth
give way to winter’s ascetic sun
that rolls across Rombald’s moor.
‘Oh. Yes, the sun, one thing
that man has not yet changed.’
© Harry J Horsman 2021
When hurt descends from the tree of life and
The stepladder breaks straight onto your pain
A trampoline turned jo-jo strangles creeping ivy
Entangles in trapezes and dreams of surrender
Pick me up where I have buried my wounded soul
Uncover my darkness and cradle my weeping heart
Mind gaps’s emotions and feelings of rational thought
Transcend into vibrating light of balance and harmony
At the bottom of searching for circles’ impermanence
Rests a rusty wheel barrow that nestles a garden of love
Sheds a load from my shoulders and unburdens torment
Fallow fields harbour seeds of regrowth and compassion
15th January 2020
I once was a tree near Hadrian's wall
That for a hundred years stood proud and tall
Then one day I was brutally cut down
Leaving broken hearts scattered all around.
My sycamore was a much treasured tree
For passers by ‘twas a precious must see
The felling was to all a dreadful shock
To the world it is a terrible loss.
As it's said, where there is life there is hope
Fortunately there is now new regrowth
One day my tree will stand there proud and tall
To honour the tree that came to a fall.
Will you be my tomorrow?
When the sun creeps languorously
Red and purple swirls,
golden tentacles stretching,
stretching to embrace the spreading wings of birds aflutter
as they draw towards those very life giving limbs as they
burst through the skies vividly
To and fro they dart
a choir of beautiful solo proclamations disjointed yet unified
Great trunks sturdy
lifting greens higher,
higher to drink of that potion
Buds, slowly they unfurl giving way to dainty leaves
How carefully they are veined, their sustainance obtained
Leaning blades they weep as they witness
the beauty of my tomorrow, today
Will you be my tomorrow?
Vicious winds howling
Oranges, browns swirling
like dancers they flutter to the ground
Soft blanket of fallen pieces carefully laid
disrobed from gnarly fingers striving,
yes striving for perseverance
Garbled birdsong , hunched wings
as they retreat into cocoons of their creation
woven and threaded pecked and mud slung
perfect in their complexity,
beautiful in simplicity
See where there is stunting, blades no longer lush but
trodden to bareness beneath the carpet of debris that paves a way for regrowth
tomorrow...
but what about today?
Fast flowing rivers in spring
Diverting, shooting around rocks
Eroding banks along the shore line
Water moves, furious and icy cold
Rushing along at a hurried pace
Budding trees, cling to surrounding banks
Once barren, new life has sprung
New sprinkling of color among shades of green
Regrowth, regeneration, a new season arrives.
4/4/13
Their numbers drawn, the backwards lottery
Almost none were aware they were playing
Assaulted by the poisons that save them
Hairless children with steroid-swollen cheeks
Feared stigmata of chemotherapy
Daily valiance, heroism unsought
Magic bullets are a relative thing
Modern wonder within the foulest curse
Not many years ago, a death sentence
Now, survival rate of eighty percent
It’s miraculous,
but if it’s your child
Then it’s a slow round of
Russian Roulette
Our own bullet burn unforgettable
Swelling in his eye, excised then regrown
For those of you playing along at home
Regrowth is a very ominous sign
Mucous Associated Lymphoma
Our newest demon, bane of our baby
Based on looks, it’s sixty percent likely
The microscope will have the final word
Sword of Damocles hangs
for six long weeks
As a succession of pathologists shrug
I can do the math much quicker than that
It’s sixty percent times twenty percent,
Probability times mortality
Twelve percent chance he will not live five years
Our sweet baby boy, turned budding young man
A gun with eight cylinders, one cartridge
Facts melt like lead into a bullet mold
Neither dead nor alive, Schrödinger’s cat,
His fate, an unseen quantum paradox
Not resolved until we open his box
And create life or death by witnessing.
Savoring the taste of each day as a
Maddening flavor of infinity
As we wait for a loud click or a bang
Finally the word arrives:
no cancer.
Spared, this fate of others,
no good reason
Not a part of God’s plan for us
this time
5/22/16
© Thomas W. Quigley
It is gone forever now, a swirling mote of dust,
above the hills and fields, memorial fleck of dying love,
vanishing from tear swept sight, away from the world,
oh how can life continue now, how can it go on?
In cruel desolation, such cold, numb emptiness
where scalpel sharp pain wields a wafer thin blade
daily drawn, lacerating nervous tissue and nuances of emotion,
slow, meticulous, precise, a living thing this pain.
Silvery and honed to savour each slash and each nick
with the sick sadist glee of a diligent torturer;
tears cannot be cried anymore, dried out now, Winter cold,
desert arid and Easter Egg hollow, a screaming skull inverted.
Bleeding dry, bleeding dry, a pale anaemic husk;
eyes look but do not register the living world,
fingers touch but do not feel the pulse of regrowth,
ears listen but do not hear the words to set things right.
One of the almost dead who envies the truly dead,
the truly dead for their interment to inanimate peace,
for where will my love find the object to lavish itself upon,
who will hold me now as one who did before?
No courage at all, only the curse of the craven to endure,
less than surreal, no longer human, nothing outwardly tangible
save a mass of screaming, electrifying pain
howling down the empty corridors running beneath the flesh.
The hardest of hard lessons are learned and learned so well,
taught as only a past master of deranged ardour can teach;
the loss of sanctity when expelled from the mother womb
is the outset of the clue to life's meaning.
From this point forth, the love object is a thing to be lost,
family, friends, possessions, innocence, integrity...mind,
eventually life itself, for all is ultimately stripped away,
with each love object finite and thus both fabulous and terrifying to behold.
If loss be the meaning of life, vice versa, the meaning of life be loss,
instilling life with it's value and fragility;
your trauma spills indistinction, uncertainty - the loss of the love object,
wreaking ball on my defences - and likewise my refuge from pain...
Celebration
Spring Equinox arrives
The time for rebirth, rejuvenation
resurrection and regrowth,
Festivals of Holi and Easter,
Vivid hues of green
and vibrant colours of flowers,
Crops will sprout,
Buds will swell,
Birds will mate
and young ones born.
Goddess in all blossoms will reside.
Good bye to longest nights
and those quilted cosy fights,
No more hibernation,
No more freezing frost bites,
Will miss snow capped beauty
shine in every morning sunrise,
Those favourite furry coats
and embracing woollen sights.
From winter's warm embrace
to a scintillating colourful Spring ....
Written March 31st, 2016
For contest by Shadow
I moved onto the farm when I was eleven,
To the farm eroded of trees.
I’d stand on the hill in the middle of summer,
Unshaded in a blistering breeze.
Then the winter shook hands and my work it began,
Iron barrow, saplings, and a spade.
I planted, I nurtured, hundreds of trees,
Before I realised I’d been betrayed.
It took a plague of rabbits a week to destroy,
Every tree in my little plantation.
So I replanted each tree, surrounded with plastic,
In a war of land occupation.
Then the sheep we had, broke through a fence,
And devoured every little one.
Damn, new strategy, wire mesh for each,
The regrowth had, now, just begun.
Then a drought, “you’re kidding” every tree turned to dust,
Every tree I’d planted with care.
The drought broke when I was fifteen, so I replanted the hill,
Replanted on a wing and a prayer.
Now, thirty years since, you can’t see the hill anymore,
It’s blanketed by leaves on the trees.
You can now stand on the hill in the middle of summer,
Shaded with a cool, calm, comfortable breeze.
The trees in the cold winter
Bared, but stood tall and upright
Alone, while whistled in no height
Waited for regrowth day and night
By their growing time baited
They were not dead as fact
From the intrinsic nature hide
They whistled for forceful thunder
Welcome the sunshine and the rainwater
Delighting the leaves like twittering birds
As well akin to the chasing toddlers
earth
I connect the earth to the painting,
Footprints in the mud,
Marble dust scratched,
The soil is drawn up, vertically
It can not be accessed any longer,
And blocks the horizon.
A thick varnish protected, precariously,
The guts, from the burning of napalm.
Moulting human skin, curls here.
The only escape, perhaps,
To sink into the earth,
Connected to the original matrix.
To seek his reincarnation.
Such as green regrowth do,
On charred stumps.
-
nov 2014
Seed - scattered strewn or downtrodden.
Grain stuck on passive flytrap mucus.
Wild life biomes ripe with open sesame.
Frantic birth pangs stiffen their gestations as green leaf ferments bubble underneath.
Mother of all wombs, diva pulse or fertile runner bean.
Maternal youth.
Eternal youth.
Bamboo shoots that wave their infant tassels
in a windmill vane.
Future plant life leveler a wobbly wellie earth crunch.
Squelching noises tower over brown air pigment mulch.
Sweet pea treasure’s
plot or topsoil script, ploughman’s pen an agri-birthmark issue.
Acorns cling to feather beak and claw with migrant species casually dispersing airborne clan.
Pity the poor bacteria as they bear their own strain.
Mediators in regrowth,
life cycle go betweens who skirt around infinity.
Pregnant life force signage points at blossom, branch and blade.
Father sky, whose azure blue tarpaulin watches blithely as we earthlings bloom like algae.
Captain chlorophyll, the sunshine nabbing pirate rules the waves.
Sugar dazzle booty on display for fortune hunters everywhere.
Placenta of the rural outcrop overstretched.
Nourishing, replenishing yet prematurely procreates its progeny.
Compost layer genus code emulsions where thorny splatters worm themselves inside.
Gene pool mirror drapes its vibrant colour wash on foetal lime bow and arrow twigs.
A prism to some rainbow tint or shaft.
Muddy waters percolating sluggishly through all those clay born matrices below.
Our natural breeds now wet nurse turf ground offspring.
Nutrients absorbed by network carriers- sprout and stem WIFI eco-mates.
Elevator of the undergrowth in embryo.
Going up going down.
Timeless womb your time will always come.
Posted 13 th August 2021
The spring morning casts a thousand bits of sunlight.
They shine like diamonds as the caress the morning dew.
Tiny bright rainbows
Colorful prisms I see
They are all for me
Regrowth, rebirth, new sprouts are everywhere.
They come up from the earth to greet the new season.
Everywhere I see, green is the scene.
Isn’t green glorious and beautiful?
The grass grows anew
Up to the sky it reaches
They’re seeking heaven
Do I want to stay indoors forever?
Not on your life! I want to get outside.
Open the door and let me out into the world of spring.
It is the season of life, and life is what I want to live.
Blessings from heaven.
Earthlings know it as the sun.
Reaching out to all
A goat without blemish
And creepers and verming
Are inserted in its mouth
Then all it's orifices are bound
The ancients sewed them up
And it driven to the wilderness
To carry away the sins of the masses
You took the fall Massiah
Carrying that cross and driven
To Golgotha carrying a heavy burden
A redemption for those willing to partake
Of the blood of the new covenant..
A lamb slain at the foundation
Of the world.. by name Word..
It took your life Uhai to create Wahyi
The prophetic word ushered life
The creating Word as the world took form
The Almighty is enthroned between the wings
Of the mighty Cherubim.. the living creatures
And the 24 elderls decree Holy holy is the Lord
Worthy is the lamb to receive the scroll
And open the seal, and proffes judgement
Lest we forget the pain and the slaughter
The rape the plunder and all the maafa
Of the land and children of the mother land
Lightening strikes, it then thunders and rain
Pours all over the land bringing renewal
Regrowth of the land signaling
As long as there is day and night
As long as harvest and planting persist
We will tend the sacred groves and proclaim
We are born of the Covenant with the Creator.
May welcomes new life
Bare branches stretch with the spring
Awake for regrowth