Ian's Poems

Ian's Poems It began as scribblings after hearing Dylan Thomas recite his poetry on a BBC recording.

Then being encouraged to write poetry, when I was 17, by an inspirational, student, English teacher whose name I forget.

09/01/2026

September. The Goddess of Autumn Enters

September came in through the open window,

not yet autumn,
but summer losing its grip -

the bruised smell of grass,
blackberries split on the hedge,
apples sweetening in the orchard
until one dropped heavily
into the long grass.

I was back at school then,

and my heart sank.

The corridors smelled of polish,
new books, pencil shavings,
dust shaken from cupboards
that had known the quiet.

Soon enough came wet coats,
mud tracked in from the playground,
wool steaming by the radiators,
the mineral damp of November
rising from shoes.

Each smell carried its burden.

September smelled of beginnings
I was not ready for.

October had the sour leaf-mould
of things already passing.

November smelled of rain
and the shortening day,
children breathing clouds
into scarves at the gate.

And January?

I could smell it coming
long before Christmas had arrived.

Yet the seasons kept working.

Apples fell.

Spiders threaded silver
through the blackening hedge.

Under the leaves
the earth took back
what summer had given.

Perhaps I was wrong
to call it ending.

Perhaps September
was simply the smell
of things becoming other things:

grass becoming leaf-mould,
summer becoming memory,
children becoming
the people they would be,

and me,
standing in the school doorway,
breathing in the cold,

learning slowly
that letting go
is one of the ways
the earth teaches us
to live.

08/31/2026

Last Night I Dreamt I Met My Young Self of Sixty Years Ago

He stood by the hedge where the hawthorn grew,
A rucksack slung careless in hand,
Shirt untucked, laces loose,
And the look in his eyes:
Not lost yet.

I asked him if he knew who I was.
He said, “You look like a man
Who’s tried to run from rain
And learned to walk with it instead.”

He offered me a sweet from a warm coat pocket.
I took it, though my teeth ached at the thought.
We sat on the wall:
That old one, the one Grandad built
And he kicked his heels
Like he still believed in Spring.

I wanted to warn him.
Not to trust the man with the silver tongue.
To love his sister more gently.
To write down the dream with the kestrel in it.

But I didn’t.

He told me he thought love would be easy.
That time was a stream he could swim up.
He said he was going to be a poet,
Or a ranger, or a priest.

I just nodded,
And watched the dusk settle in his hair.
He stood and turned,
Ran back across the field...
Feet flinging up divots of all I had lost.

Then I woke,
And...
And sat by the window with my tea,
Listening for laces,
For laughter,
For a cricket bat
Tapping lightly on the path.

08/30/2026

September Moon of an Eleven-Year-Old

The September moon
Was already teaching me about age
When I was eleven.

I didn’t know it then.
I only knew
That the evenings were changing.
The nights lengthened their shadows
Across the fields
And I wondered,

Is this what it’s like
When you get old?

Perhaps old age
Was something like September...

Summer reluctant to leave,
Light withdrawing a little earlier
Each evening,

The world becoming
More shadow than brightness.

Now I stand beneath that same moon
Over my silvering head,
And the question comes back to me
From the boy I was.

He is still there somewhere,
Looking upwards,
Counting the darkening hours
As though they were years.

The Abbey stands
In the September half-light,
Its stones remembering
What I cannot,
Monks, bells, prayers,
Generations passing through
Like weather.

The Avon keeps moving.
It has no need to explain itself.

And I begin to understand
What the eleven-year-old could not.

Growing old is not
The sudden arrival of darkness.

It is the slow discovery
That the light was never ours
To keep.

Summer leaves.

The shadows lengthen.

The moon remains.

And somewhere between the boy
And the old man,

I am still looking up.

08/29/2026

Blackberries on Bredon.

Late August, and the hedge has gone black
with the weight of itself.
Blackberries hang there
like little clustered reliquaries,
some still red with the unfinished business
of ripening,
others dark enough to hold
the last light in their skins.

I reach through the bramble
and take one.
There is always the thorn,
the old bargain,
blood for sweetness.

Beyond the hedge
the stubble fields have taken on
that dry, burnished colour
of a summer that has spent itself,
and Bredon lies low in the distance,
a long-backed presence
under a sky carrying
its freight of cloud.

Nothing moves
except the leaves worrying the wind
and the slow procession of birds.
I think of the old monks
who would have known this ground
by its seasons:
plough, seed, harvest,
bell, prayer,
the darkening of the year.
They would have walked
where the footpath now threads
between ancient oaks,
their shadows thrown
across the same earth.

At Pershore,
the Abbey tower rises
above the trees,
four pinnacles keeping watch
over what remains.
Henry took the nave
and left a wound.
Still the tower stands.
Still the river takes its reflection
and holds it without complaint.
Still, somewhere in the Abbey,
the Holy Cross is remembered;
not as an ornament
but as a splinter of history,
a piece of wood
that once entered human flesh
and changed the meaning
of suffering.

I stand beneath the old trees
and hear the silence
that churches sometimes keep
after everyone has gone.
A blackbird moves
in the leaf litter.
The path bends towards the river.
The bridge gathers the evening
into its arches,
stone above water,
water beneath stone,
each carrying the other
in its dark reflection.
And I think how little survives
in the form we expect.

A monastery becomes a parish church.
A cross becomes a relic.
A field becomes stubble.
The berry bruises in the hand
and stains the tongue.
Yet nothing is quite lost.
The sweetness remains
even after the thorn.

The hill keeps its shape.
The river keeps moving.
And the old tower,
broken but unbowed,
stands among the trees
as if to say:
this is how it is -
not preserved,
but carried.

08/29/2026

I got over 10 reactions on one of my posts last week! Thanks everyone for your support! 🎉

08/27/2026

As I prepare for a late summer holiday in Greece, I've been reminded on my Facebook memories of a holiday I had in Zakynthos in 2015 where I had to wait for a 2.30 am flight
It was a long wait in a resort that required it's tourists to be inebriated most of the day in order to cope with it.
I had returned my hired moped.
I stared and stared, and tried to listen to the cicadas that were drowned out by the noise.

I began to write something then which I have completed this morning....

Thoughts from a Cheap Holiday — Eleven Years Ago

Deprived of my moped today,
I am stranded in Laganas,
a sort of holiday Guantanamo
for the recreationally damned.

From the bars emerge,
as the sun climbs higher,
the undead.

They stagger into daylight
like confused vampires
who have somehow misplaced instruction manuals.

They have spent the night
in some ritual of alcohol, shouting and bass.

I have been basking in sunlight
for five hours.

Any moment now
I expect to see them self-implode,
leaving only
a small puff of cremated dust
and a pair of flip-flops.

I go for a walk
in search of solace,
wisdom,
perhaps even God.

Instead I become entangled
in a wilderness of shops
selling brightly coloured inflatable crap.

There are enormous rubber ducks,
pink flamingos,
things apparently designed
to keep adults afloat
while abandoning all hope
of intellectual survival.

I have fifteen hours to kill
before someone collects me
for my flight home.

Fifteen hours.

There is only so long
a thinking mind can stare
at a swimming pool
and its contents
while being assaulted
by music so repetitive
that even the cicadas
seem to be asking
for earplugs.

I don't want another bass drum.

I want the insects.

Let me hear
the cicadas arguing
with the olive trees.

Let me smell
the groves, the wild thyme baking in the sun,
not chips
slowly dying in vegetable oil.

I appear to be
in a very small minority.

The rest of my nation
seem perfectly happy
to have their holiday
deep-fried,
covered in ketchup
and served with a soundtrack
that has apparently been
on repeat since 1997.

Perhaps this
is the consequence
of booking a cheap holiday.

You save money
on the room
and spend the difference
trying not to lose your mind.

Tomorrow
I shall be home.

Until then
I remain here,

a reluctant anthropologist
among the inflatable flamingos,

waiting for civilisation
to resume.

08/19/2026

From Sitting Quietly at the Back of the Church I thought of the steady stream of people who come in looking for Something to help them.
They leave prayer cards which we offer anonymously to God in the Sunday Service and I had these thoughts...

The Prayer Cards

By the crucifix
the candles burn
with their small, persistent light.

Beside them,
prayer cards gather -

requests for a mother,
a son,
someone who is ill,
someone who has gone missing
into the darkness of their own life.

They are dropped quietly
into a basket,
little scraps of paper
carrying burdens
too heavy for the hands that wrote them.

And yet there is faith here.

A deep, stubborn faith
swimming against
the great maelstrom of indifference
that seems to swirl around us.

I linger in the chapel.
I've come to the quiet
But

A coin falls
into the box behind me.

A rattling vibrancy
Shimmering infinity

Someone has invoked a prayer
and moved on.

Then, sometimes,
during the service,
a frightened soul
scurries past the faithful -

not caring much
for the choreography of worship,
the standing and sitting,
the ancient words
we have learned to say.

They are looking for something
more immediate.

A living God.

The One we speak of
so confidently
and struggle so often to see.

Perhaps that is why
I keep returning
to the candles,

to the little cards
in the basket,

to these imperfect prayers
written by trembling hands.

Because somewhere
between the flame
and the silence,

between the coin,
the thought ikons,
and the whispered name,

something is still being asked.

And perhaps,
even now,

something is listening.

08/17/2026

Sitting Quietly in Church Searching for the Missing Messages

I have been searching the church
for the messages we seem to have lost.

Not the notices pinned to the board,
nor the carefully printed words
that tell us where to sit
and when to stand.

I mean the other messages.

The ones hidden
somewhere between the silence
and the singing.

The message that says
you are not alone.

That the stranger beside you
may be carrying a sorrow
you cannot see.

That forgiveness
is not weakness.

That love
is still more important
than being right.

That God may speak
more quietly than we would like,
rarely in the language
of committees.

I search beneath the hymns,
inside the ancient prayers,
among the worn stones
where generations have knelt
and left their questions.

Perhaps the message
has not disappeared at all.

Perhaps we have simply
become too busy
speaking for God
to hear Him.

And so I sit quietly
at the back of the church,

waiting for the silence
to remember
what we have forgotten.

08/16/2026

The Lanyard Class

They scurry everywhere,
These people with lanyards,
Identification swinging from their necks
Like tiny flags of belonging.

They speak another language.

Strategic.
Dynamic.
Innovative.
A paradigm shift
Towards something nobody quite understands.

We oldies stand outside
With our noses pressed against the glass,
Watching the lanyard class
Nod wisely at the latest idea.

Nobody asks
Whether it is actually a good idea.
Whether it is true.

That would be
Rather awkward.

So the tribe nods,
The PowerPoint advances,
The biscuits disappear,

And some wonderfully ridiculous notion
Is quietly transformed
Into mediocre reality.

Nothing is challenged.

Everyone agrees
That everyone agrees.

And somewhere in the corner
An ' awkward' man whispers,

“Would somebody mind
Telling me
What the bloody hell
We’re doing?”

His lanyard,
Thank God,
Is missing.

08/09/2026

How to Be a Poet

First, acquire a notebook
with a respectable leather cover
and that faint smell of seriousness.

Carry it everywhere.

Never write in it.

A poet must be ready
for the sudden appearance
of a metaphor
like the Transfiguration
by the bus stop,
at the reduced-for-quick-sale shelf,
or while watching a pigeon
walk through a puddle
with the solemnity of a bishop.

Learn to look at ordinary things
until they become unbearable.

A cracked mug
is no longer a cracked mug.

It is childhood.

A dead leaf - mortality.

The man in the café
staring at his phone
is civilisation
waiting for its battery to die.

Avoid writing about sunsets
unless you can make the sunset
feel slightly guilty.

Use the word darkness
sparingly.

Use soul
only when nobody is listening.

And never, under any circumstances,
explain the poem.

If someone asks what it means,
look thoughtfully towards the window
as though the answer
has just flown away.

Then say,

“It’s about existence.”

That usually works.

Finally, remember
that poetry is not about finding
the extraordinary in the ordinary.

It is about staring at the ordinary
for so long
that it begins to feel nervous.

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Guernsey, WY
GY79FD

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