Beyond my kitchen window, grey skies
crumble like clinker over empty fields.
The scarlet willow bends in the easterly,
branches stripped naked like veins.
Crows smudge charcoal on the horizon.
Indoors, I inhale recycled air and open
my liquid crystal display. Your face bubbles
expectantly, cornered. Behind you double
doors slide shut, a TV grumbles. You hold
a Bugs Bunny mug, ‘What’s up Doc?’
The Purple Hermit 
Really like the 1st verse especially “crumble like clinker over empty fields” reminds of when I lived in Sheffield travelling through its East End, this time an economic “lockdown” of the 1980s and mass unemployment. Clinker scattered over derelict land, enormous abandoned steel mills, formed empty “canyons” as the locals called them (the defunct factory walls rising steeply on either side), deserted empty streets under cold grey skies.
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That sounds like the basis for a poem Alastair. The eighties- when the rot set in with Thatcherism and the ideology of ‘no such thing as society’ only individual pleasure and greed. Let us hope that this pandemic might spark a permanent change in attitudes.
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Love this. So visual I can just imagine it. 💜
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Thanks Meg, glad you like it. I’m grateful to have views of nature instead of tarmac and brick walls. I feel for those locked into small apartments with no outside space right now.
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Oh yes. Me too. I have pasture across from the house. Stone walls and sheep! Which is lovely, lockdown or not!
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That sounds wonderful. We sometimes have sheep or cows in the back field too…much to the consternation of my cat! This is the time to appreciate the little things in our lives. 😻
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Yes, it is! The birds singing, the daffodils blooming… I’ll take any all the little bright spots in the day.
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