Saraswatink

Empty line, early winter, low water greys. Runners rain on Putney’s parade and rowers stride to their club coffee Sunday. From homogeneous crew, head East to Barking’s eclectic hue.

Swap trains for the marshes and the seabirds cry. Truckloads spoonbill the landfill nearby. 

Wind backing West to the slate grey of the lesser black backed Gulls, their temporary wetland trails.  Face painting kittiwakes and bubble blowing cheer.  Veer East to the docks where laundry clings to black balcony rails. 

Trains invite to stay on their telegraph lines – the train sitter’s cry and mine. 

Seagulls shriek at each stop on the line, the convulsive carriage spewing on the quay side.  M. Antoinette’s head fell plumed with Egrets and birders watch on from the hide – the wedge of nature left. 

In the lyrical undergrowth, lies the weight of humankind.

Home is carving one’s own comforting reality. A timespan, a feeling borrowed from a previous space, an instinctual goosebump, a deep core lift.

Hiking feels like Home. Being in a state of flux, passing through yet arresting time. One step into another marking the space in which we stood and predicting the imprint in which we will be. When we feel at Home, we are sculpting time out of our life path, picking berries. Home is multiplicity of time and space.

Jittering leaves in a park and distant child’s play, jittering leaves like blades of mackerel. Evening sunlight sleeping with nature, a barn owl calling in the night. Home is the sum of our memories, those sensorial slices of time. When we forget, we lose our sense of what home means.

A boat house quietly observes the skylight reflection of azure rectangular ponds

set in a line of corrugated slate ridges of teal blue coastal moss.

Seapinks, stone-cropped into the fissures of crumbling walls, lollipop into the maritime path of May.

Glimpse in slow motion Davy Grey’s free fall to Seven Wells Hollow.

Time has drifted and stopped like a canoe bottled in a cove.

Sea-anchored to the tide.

Time leads lonely souls to the burrow of this path,

to hide.

In quiet contemplation of a fossiliferous past, crumbling under the dust of its porcelain cliffs.

As if Kimmeridge shale had been an unfair accident of fate.

Engulfing nature’s Eocene,

fossilising memories obscene, into layers of sediment smoke.

China ink, Graphite, Pitt Pastel, Oil Pastel, Brush Pen, Charcoal

White and Blue.

I’m just a passer-by calling you a colour, sister.

Your eyes grit from the night cries.

You sit on a rough-sleeper’s pit.

The stench of that bench coincides with the slow morning rise and the early bird runners but you were there first.

White and Blue.

The space inhabited by your silence. I can’t sit by you.

I hurry on with my own baby cries and the length of the night in my eyes. Mindless daze and cold coffee haze. Books – fuzzy spines on the shelves left unread. Storylines melting on my window like sleet, half winter, half spring.

Clawing at the wind.

Throgmorton’s Threadneedle Thrift

Is the fairest of them all.

Office gossip wraps around

The columns of the Royal Exchange –

Banks interchange

The lunch hour, the rush hour

Smiles.

[The Royal Exchange

Twice burnt down,

Stockbrokers hissing at it

From Jonathan’s coffee house.

Ablaze too, once.]

Festive penguins sipping blue cocktails

Without chewing the lime

Slice.

Stockbrokers hissing twice.

Twenty somethings,

In navy trousers and sky blue shirts

With cardboard cups and glass houses –

“Play ball

Now play ball

Now!”

Meanwhile, Tellers’ talk of the morning’s tally

Extend

Into the folds of piggy blankety

Blanks.

On rosy cheeked desks,

rest,

jewels, long legs, polished shoes,

laddered flanks.

Drawings inspired by those earthly happenings that knot, swell, contract, expand and shake us.

China ink, charcoal, oil pastel, graphite, pencil, brush pen.

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