Tuesday, January 31, 2012


Wet From the Womb

WET FROM THE WOMB


Here I am, born (but not stillborn).
I’m being passed around, to be admired,
to be compared with others’ offsprings.
When I laugh for joy of life or scream
my being generates my parents’ joy.

Later in life the picture changes
for novelty is a transient gift;
siblings bring rivalry, seasons pass,
hair sprouts in strange places. Secret’s
out that you’re not so welcome round the house.

Sometimes you’ll see in the garden perched
on the birdbath, remote, as if moping,
a solitary dove or mudlark.
A closer look reveals lesion upon
lesion about head and neck. An outcast.

Time and the hour may run through rough days
but life is a road paved with travails
of separations. One after one they mark
love’s toughest lessons ever after
that moment when we were wet from the womb.
                                                                                    Glen Phillips © January, 2012.

Soon it will be my birthday the 21st of February

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Today's Poem

POWER OF DELUGE

In April in the country after month
upon month of summer the air
changes: skies take on the milkiness
of the film on a blind man’s eyes.
 Suddenly there is not the welcome cool
of evening. In the night the air is chill
and mornings follow in a hazy fume.

Across the windstruck skyline suddenly
like the tail of a kite, raucous black
cockatoos fly screeching to the pine tops.
And children call them the ‘rain birds’.
 Where they have been you see holocausts
of torn twigs and ransacked cones
scattered on the silent earth beneath the pines.

And now at night you hear the hidden frogs
whooping their calls. They importune
the King of Frogs to unloose his great
pale belly distending with the winter rains.
Night after night they chant and chant
litanies in the gardens, in the fields.
And at last in the norwest, darkening the earth,
rises the shadowed bulk of their King!

As often times over the lowlands
of Sumeria or the Nile           
when that scent of rain at evening
has promised the rising flood,
the frogs redoubled their pleading chants;
and a patter of answering drops comes
on the powdery dust. Dry grass stoops,
the tree leaves quiver like moths,
then ranks of grey showers hammer the roofs;
I see dark rivulets run from the spouts this night.

Afterwards as the rain steadies
on the black glistening road,
the thankful white-robed crowds
of frogs advance out of swamp and ditch
to stand in the beam of our lights,
heads aloft to their awaited God-King.
Their faith, their great longing satisfied
just as our whizzing tyres
smack them down, as if they were pale leaves
pasted on the stones by rush of rain.

            © Glen Phillips, 1969.