Rainfall pulls the blinds,
on bouncy folk’s wild picnic,
vile thunder as wet blanket,
yet blindside sunburst’s,
so prompt relief augurs well,
for merry beanfest revived
Ominous dark cloud,
imagined plague, close peril,
might scupper gallant junket,
but fleeting storm front,
heartens madcap daring poised,
to trailblaze gold rush frontiers
Some wish to fight for Africa
Being an African by birth
Proud of our fathers land
We wish as much to fight our stand
While we are fighting ourselves
Most pray for a rebirth
Some want to be british
While many admire Paris
We have all laboured to build Abuja
But many still heart Lagos
And others are accenting Port harcourt
Yet we all hail one Nigeria
Fighting for Africans
Fight with one hand
The other hand preserve at allegiance
To fighting other Africans that want you hellish
Nigeria will be great
Though we all smell Oduduwa
Biafrans are unrelenting
Very soon Hishbah will crave out something
Continue praying
As we do hope; many scupper
There is still hope in waiting
But how do we convince the rangers?
Yonder there, where twig figures bend
and blink out as a sea-swell slugs the beach,
there the netted thrash, then hauled, toggled and pinched
yet more, into a gill-snagging catch.
Far away a village rests, submerged
beneath a mossy night, yet some prowl out
seeking ways to scrub a bare-knuckled living,
some to find a new prayer in the restless surf.
There a woman in denim is digging for clams,
I trudge upon a leaky flow to edge near,
to see her blue buckets mouth, its salty slosh,
to tell her I laud her rooting stick, the prod and scoop
of her delving hands.
Here by the spume, a spotty dog runs and scuffs tidal pools,
it scampers between weedy humps, a tangle of sea-scupper;
nose snuffling a tangy furrow in the sandy smaze.
Now the dawn sky breaks apart above and below,
let’s slip a far-off world as yet unmade.
Near or far seem only a fingerprint of wind and light,
a painted wave for distant viewing –
always a yonder truth
on the margins of nil and naught.
Wobbly knees wheeze and tease
Dark thoughts fumbling, tumbling and rumbling in the mind
Which can no longer squeeze proportion peas
From thought processes, procedures and systems gone blind
In the wake of the disaster
Determined to scupper efforts
I summon to master faster
Techniques and strategies to rescue ports and forts
In which hides the succor
With the potential to dismiss the blues
Whose rancor
Fed up with queues and incomplete clues
Threaten to overwhelm vestiges of peace and calm
My world once knew
As avalanches of harm
Primed to strike anew
Sweeping, wiping off from my soul
Traces of confidence
Whose sole goal stole
From my predicament the credence cadence
That slowly began to pave the way for hope
To return
My state of affairs to normalcy to prop
Up the urn
In which ashes of despair
Began to evaporate
To initiate by gradation the repair
Process and flair in which dark thoughts could neither elaborate harm nor collaborate.
Friend Ship
When my inner compass falters
with joy suspended from a sinking buoy
as waves rush by in sunken dreams
you shine the torch’s flare of sun and moon
When the tell tale light house fades
shrouded in the miserable fog of doubt
as currents scupper down with leaden anchour
you catch the comet’s touch of fallen stars
When the mocking pirates entertain
gloomy thoughts from skippers’ ropes
as darkness permeates the ship wrecked sailor
you share your life boat’s stellar luster
When broken drift wood fragments spike
the surface looms with shark’s grim grin
as buccaneers maroon the lost survivor holding on
you salvage patiently with love and kindness
You tug me into wherever our paths will venture
You are the vessel and the oars that row
01 May 2018
Brexit Sonnet No.21
‘This Emerald Isle’
So where’s it gone, this border fraught of ours?
It can’t be seen, this separation sore,
Drawn ‘cross troubled Isle by warlike Mars;
Scratched on map by infected hand of war.
Ignored by happy breed of Brexit man,
This spectre’s yet to come to Leaver’s feast,
Its fortress build and scupper faultlined plan,
With moat defensive, to drown the Brexit Beast.
So letteth not your Brexit lover’s passion
Be chilled or damped by spectre’s waiting rage.
Ignore it by all means and truth do ration,
And think of happier things that turn your page.
This blessed plot, this earth, this Emerald Isle,
Must choketh not on Brexit’s bitter bile
©Keith Murphy
There was a sharp rise
of indecent things. On the
rocks you left my name
without flowers.
Make a heap of all
the gifts of life and griefs and
start a bonfire. No message
is going to come.
Let us live in separate bowls
of soup. Time had swept
them clean for a murder.
One day the alien god will
alight from the sins,
to alter the numbers.
The mudslide of untruths
will scupper your house
made of paper and pen.
Satish Verma
I am Nebuchadnezzar
As I eat grass
As my arrogance and pride
Turned me into an ass
I am humbled, I am lost
I am on all-fours
And I cannot even count
The cost
I am Rommel
As I charge through the sands
As hot metal oil steel
Conquers vast empty lands
I am lost
As I count the cost
As billions of flies
Sit on a thousand dead eyes
I am Callas
I am Coriolanus
I am Yeats
I am Bill Gates
I am – I am
One of a kind
As the sleeve-strapped jacket
Has buckled my mind
I sing for my supper
My supper sings back
As my hidden fleet will scupper
As my U-boat’s hulls crack
And as I sink in my sleep
My debris will rust
Down to the deep
Of madness and lust
THUNDERSTORM
Thick oppressive sultriness all day
Then cool breezes, a cloud signals
The sails of a fighting Armada,
With massed grey galleons
Swelling with threatening guns -
The flashing of their watery cannon beats
Their terrifying cacophony
In the cross-trees and shivering sheets -
Hurled balls of rain, rain, rain
So thick the air is opaque;
Rain without end, Noah’s rain,
Making deck drain and scupper shake
Riddling the sea with bullet-hole spray.
Now empty cannon fall still and silent:
The Armada has drifted away.
The air is dry and clear and spent.
Jonah invented the whale
The first man ever to sail
He went round the globe
In his best Sunday robe
His invention was destined to fail
For Noah had plans for an ark
It’s construction no walk in the park
It took a few years
Some blood sweat and tears
But finally Noah made his mark
His wife tried most every ruse
To convince him to go for a cruise
He said, “I’ve been told
To fill up the hold
With gerbils and bush kangaroos”
They brought on the creatures in pairs
The rhinos and hippos downstairs
But space was so tight
Some put up a fight
Especially the grizzly bears
When the rains came the ark was a float
And Noah, on the bridge he did gloat
Saying “didn’t I say?
It would happen one day”
Said his wife “I could rip out his throat,
This is not what most folk call cruising
With gorillas and lemmings and ewes in
My cabin at night
It just isn’t right
I don’t find it very amusing”
So Noah’s wife concocted a plot
To scupper her hubbys new yacht
With her turn at the wheel
Her nerves she did steel
And crashed into Mount Ararot
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