Spring Chorus

The Blue Tit

The Blue Tit sits on the orchard bough
her avian mind consults the now:
sun and flowers and crows and bugs
she perches she poses she sniffs the breeze
she shrugs and sings, "I'm quite at ease
with sun and flowers
attending the hours
as if things were planned to do as i please"
"That's what i think," the Blue Tit sings
on the orchard bough
blithely folding her wings.

©Laurie Ashton, mmiii

Sunny Corner

There's sometimes a sunny corner
just nicely in the shade
where gloom can gather glimmer
and no remarks are made

where daffodils or tulips
spring-born delight to show
they love the clement weather
and they are good to know

where love has planted seed
a garden fit is raised
and folk go arm-in-arm
through rows of life amazed

there's sometimes a sunny corner
to watch proceedings from
a garden in a nutshell
a place when no-one's home

©Laurie Ashton, spring '99

To fly a kite

To fly a kite light in the sky
a streamer-cloud balloons blowing children hallo-ing
looking up wide-eyed

i'd rather be born again
than died in the wool at school head bent over
perusing paper with inkblots scrawls marks
for a hundred per cent the ultimate

flip your lid! fly that kite! watch it duck as we tug
leaping eager to clamber out of sight
kids must be wrong as well as right
trust as strong as a heart-string can pull us down to earth
for a rebirth

those desks they sit in
with lids like kettles over ids
simmering
scrawled on blackboards like toilet-walls
'two and two make four' (raise your hand when you know the score)

jericho blow! fanfare of hope! eye's opening wider
greeting the spider's web of kite trails in cloud-streamers
of windwards blowing children ho-hoing like Buddha

lap it up! whoop it up!
kittycat can look at the queen
where have you been lately growing up?

©Laurie Ashton, mmi revised [197_?]

To hell with thee

Oh, to hell with thee, bright morning
who with thy one good eye
startles my coiled senses
into dazed antipathy

go spin thy sticky spider's web
to catch the flies and dew
surprise the bloodless lily
who may see her petals droop
or send the morning glory up
a fence to reach the top

thou order'st
they can't resist
the mad engendering
but i possess the state they miss
and spurn thine urgent ambience

so toil away with cocksure vim
but withdraw the importunate summons
thy mandate sooner i'd ignore
than break my snoring sacrament
for i was old when thou wert born
summary impertinent may dawn

©Laurie Ashton, '99 [c. '74]

Summer, '72

Once upon a goodly Summertime
there fell a Winter wind
and i fell ill
sick at heart
wilfully whimpering
whimsically caught
like a parachuted seed
on a splintered limb
that might otherwise
gladly land anywhere
to coax the cold earth
through the pale year
to burst into Spring
blossoming

©Laurie Ashton, mm