A Poem a Day (721): A purple rose

 
A purple rose
 
In this place a light went out
yet its echo still flickers, still lingers,
an arc of rainbow reflected in rain,
a dance of scattered notes.
Patches, flowers, cards & empty cans,
dreams that will never set.
Memories of places, faces, dances,
conversations & drunk romances,
his voice drowning everything,
like water reviving parched earth,
& we are found no longer crying,
but reliving every chance meeting,
every song, every riff, every drum roll,
digging the beat within our rib cage,
& every time the lights seemed to blow out
as we staggered into the starry night
like zombies, our hearts full of lyrics,
silenced a while in contemplation,
smiling wide, eyes bright, feeling lighter,
our spirits swept up by sound.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, July 30, 2025

A Poem a Day (720): Burial in water

 
Burial in water
 
It’s a listening thing,
fake disappearing, halo effect,
a plunge into obscurity,
disintegrating in oceans rapt,
a burial, held aloft to wonder at,
to hold, let fall into dust –
feather-like, stranded stars
crossing the sky like ants.
 
The childlike dance of the mystic
hits you, a rainbow striding,
motions arcing over broken idols
drilled into the shore.
You count the score when you
should plunge, salted, disheveled,
into breath. A starfish shapes itself
in sand, winks its orange skin,
 
and I pick it up, this delicate life,
its radiating heat, rhythmic beat,
guide it through the crystal deep.
The horizon walks a heady line.
It whispers sometimes,
bubbles beneath this jaded sun,
an arc of dripping yolk burning
words of hope into water.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 18, 2025

A Poem a Day (719): Sea claws

 
A prompt from napowrimo.net: “I challenge you to find a news article and write a poem using (mostly, if not only) words from the article. You can repeat them, splice them and rearrange them however you like. Although the vocabulary may be just the facts, your poem doesn’t have to be.”
 
Here’s draft 2 of my poem and the spliced version follows underneath.

 
Sea claws
 
Choose an article & splice it,
redo, refit, the prompt said,
so I hunted for a happy one, devoid
of war & fighting, death, hate
& suffering. It took a while.
 
So here we are with lobsters,
those snippy little fellows with claws,
a crusher & a cutter, aqua-true
with beady black eyes.
 
Homarus Gammarus, to be posh,
or European lobster to me & you,
paddling the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
In calm waters around St Michael’s Mount,
baby lobsters indulged in their first swim,
all 1,088 of them, ten weeks old
& just an inch long.
 
You’ll need to check a map
as to its whereabouts,
but it’s pretty famous,
so you can probably picture it.
 
It was the end of a challenge
to do 25 releases in 25 locations,
a happy 25th anniversary
to the National Lobster Hatchery.
5,000 little snappers in all.
 
A female lobster can carry 20,000 eggs
in her belly, but only one is expected to survive
out there in the wild.
 
Released from a little plastic tube
they dive down, limbs flaying, scuttling,
to settle on the seabed & burrow
deep into spongy sediment
to spend a year learning how to live
in the bounteous sea.
 
You can even adopt one.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

 
 
Sea claws (the spliced version)
 
Happy devoid,
no war, no suffering,
a shakeup into cuteness.
It took a while.
 
With crusher & cutter,
snippy & aqua-true,
Homarus Gammarus paddles
the Atlantic to the Azores.
 
Ten weeks old
& just an inch,
baby lobsters begin
their maiden voyage.
1,088 tiny clappers floating free.
 
A dive down, scuttle
& burrow deep into the sea floor.
They’ll spend a year here,
learning how to live.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 17, 2025

A Poem a Day (718): The circle

 
The circle
 
There is a reason
bereft of season
extinct of leaves
that survives emotion,
a release to savour
beyond endeavour
the world’s compassion
amid pure elation,
to seek to celebrate
outside the obstinate
all the indelicate,
afraid to waken it.

Beneath this starlight
jibes another trick
that licked the night,
the way it burned so bright.

We stand still in time
outside of every rhyme,
every turn in the sky
seeking truth, not lie,
fierce oceans ironing out
beyond any doubt
this desire to speak
when you feel so meek,
a vowel left unsaid,
a need unfed.

So we caress water,
defend with laughter,
stand still, naked,
always so eternally naked.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (717): Crossing water

 
Crossing water
 
We gaze into the ears of seashells,
listen for the soft surf of water’s flow,
the truth of all our destinations,
a lover waiting in the wings,
this always-in-the-ether maybe.
 
We dance on beaches we once drew,
recite conversations we never wrote,
seek recalled waves from all our yesterdays
and watch the sun set into a sleeping sea.
And somehow we are encouraged
 
to walk on, to swim, crash, rise or fall.
So here we are, not so small after all.
We are the waking and the being,
and the rush of something else
we can never get a handle on,
 
but here we are in our looking glass,
reflected in flittering black obsidian,
wondering who stares back at us,
clerical, whimsical, ephemeral,
and we are reborn without even wishing it.
 
Distance is a subtle turn of the page
or a deep dive through a kaleidoscope
of shiftless shapes we cannot even see
until here we stand at the all too familiar
crossroads, seeing only as far as we are allowed,
 
burrowing against our every restriction,
throwing caution to the delight of our heart.
We are the divided outside of division.
We are the wonder that we ever spent this long
drifting.

 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

A Poem a Day (716): Exit right

 
Exit right
 
Where she is
she drifts like water flows,
a warm abyss, your welcome
into sweltering rain.
Pure rush, this downpour,
an effervescent everything.
 
And when she subsides
you’ll feel it
in the silences,
the emptied out,
the spaces she’ll leave behind
in the walkout, the exit,
the surrender outside of herself
just to be her.
 
To be the person who lived
before you,
before the accusations,
the dance, the pretence,
the other women you couldn’t ignore,
the criticisms, the putdowns
cos she could never be enough
for you.
 
But she didn’t need to be.
That’s the kicker,
the punch,
your realisation. So,
you’re gonna have to forgive her
cos it was you that wasn’t enough.
She walked through the blizzard
and she kept going.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, June 14, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 28: Cruel summer

 
Day 28 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today, we challenge you to write a poem that involves music at a ceremony or event of some kind.

I decided to write a poem made of loads of titles of songs/albums. See if you can spot them.

 
Cruel summer
 
In the still of the night
he could get no satisfaction:
“What’s going on?”
“Dream on,” the girl replied,
as he gazed at the Waterloo sunset,
thinking how nothing else matters.
He needed a whole lotta love,
but he was living on a prayer.
Am I losing my religion, he wondered,
just like yesterday, or something.
“I wanna rock you like a hurricane,”
he somehow blurted out,
and she sped off down Abbey Road.
Ice, ice, baby! Imagine.
She was a rebel girl. No Maggie May.
He’d hoped on heaven being a place on earth,
but love just wasn’t in the air tonight.
Que sera, sera, he thought.
Layla just wasn’t gonna light his fire
tonight or any other night. She’d pick up
one of the boys of summer instead.
Epic. I will survive, he thought –
I’m a rocket man with great balls of fire –
so he took the midnight train to Georgia,
Gangnam style, just a smalltown boy
looking for his dancing queen.
 
Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 26: Night of the hunter

 
Day 26 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Try your hand at a sonnet – or at least something sonnet-shaped. Think about the concept of the sonnet as a song, and let the format of a song inform your attempt. Be as strict or not strict as you want. 14 lines/10 syllables per line/the Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. 
 
 
Night of the hunter
 
It’s the loneliest time of the hunter,
this curse of night, an avenging clawed moon.
Bereft of sound, he moves on, a panther
crossing roofs, sunk alleys, life out of tune.
 
There is never a chase, only faint hope
for the North Star’s glow to show him the way.
He wastes no energy, shores up his scope,
outside time, place and the ordinary.
 
He searches land and sea for the one true,
who escaped, pursued, the muse to his art.
A bunch of chaste white roses, the thorns pruned,
he holds, but only shadow in his heart.
 
Her photo lived in his pocket for years,
but her image washed away in his tears.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 27: A new chapter

 
Day 27 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that describes a detail in a painting, and that begins, like Auden’s poem, with a grand, declarative statement.
 
I chose Turner’s 'Rain, Steam and Speed' painting (1844).

 

A new chapter
 
Rain, steam, speeds the passage
of time, unheeded, a heady sprint 
into the dust of evening’s song,
an emptying of the greyest clouds.
 
Feel the slight of waiting here
in the station, a huddled pile of clothes.
Suitcase bulging, ticket in pocket,
but he was never going to show.
 
Watch the destinations click down
as you count the years on one hand.
You read all the places out loud until only
one train is left. It won’t wait forever.
 
All steam spirals. It fills the spaces,
the in-betweens, the maybes, lost faces,
all traces of the times even you forgot,
seeks to smother all memory of them.
 
You could stay, but there is no reason,
so you join the departures at the gate.
For there is steam and there is speed,
and there is the rain to make haste in.
 
It washes the dirt from the windows,
your eyes and your skin. It strips clean
the days, the months you stood waiting
until you lost more than just time.
 
You spit on your finger, wipe your shoe,
smooth your skirt, unpin your hat,
open your coat and settle in. You’ve far
to go but already feel lighter.
 
Stone bridges are for crossing,
towns are for leaving. The river spreads
below you, hills rising either side.
Unkempt trees sway, throw blossom away.
 
Each season has a reason, keeps bed for the night.
You open your book to the first chapter,
read the title, see the whole page inked in,
unlike the one you’ve embarked upon.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 28, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 25: Echoes

 
Day 25 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: In her poem, senzo, Evie Shockley recounts the experience of being at a live concert, relating it the act of writing poetry. Today we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that recounts an experience of your own in hearing live music and tells how it moves you.
 
I went off-prompt for this one, remembering a holiday and standing among ancient rock formations. So, it’s all about sound, and the sound of the place, rather than a concert.

 
Echoes
 
Listen to the earth,
life’s time echo in the red,
deepset against a cyan sky.
Set feet deep, dig down,
synchronise so you’re in balance.
 
Listen to the earth’s drum,
a distinct roll, a heartbeat,
the raindance of the shaman
opening his hands to the cirrus clouds
feeling the weight of the wind.
 
Listen to the earth’s beat
in rhythm, like the eagle’s wings,
a sweeping eclipse of the soul.
In the still you can hear the echo,
the pump of blood through water.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 25, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 6: Cinnamon

 
Day 6 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today’s prompt veers slightly away from our ekphrastic theme. To get started, pick a number between one and 10. Now scroll down until you come to a chart. Find the row with your number. Then, write a poem describing the taste of the item in Column A, using the words that appear in that row in Column B and C. 
My words: cinnamon – wheeze – golden

Cinnamon
 
I light a candle in my vigil,
watch the flame wheeze in the air,
wax trickle into a pool
of silent memory.
 
Cinnamon snakes around me,
serves me a slice of apple pie,
sugar crystallising on warm pastry,
crimped edges tinged golden brown.
 
I can taste it on my tongue,
and suddenly my grandmother is here,
holding out her wooden spoon
as she used to do when we were baking,
 
when I would tiptoe at the table
covered in heaps of snow
to dip my finger in the mixing bowl,
stick it in my mouth with a grin.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 7: Made by Matisse

 
Day 7 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Today, we challenge you to write a kind of self-portrait poem in which you explain why you are not a particular piece of art (a symphony, a figurine, a ballet, a sonnet), and use at least one outlandish comparison and a strange (and maybe not actually real) fact.

 
Made by Matisse
 
I have not the grace of the ballet,
pirouetting among sleek swans
posed in my lace pink tutu,
adorned with a trail of glittering stars.
I do not yearn for the spotlight,
the crowd, the roar, the applause.
 
When the curtain rises, I am not there.
I am backstage in the shadows,
treasuring my anonymity as I roam
soundless and unnoticed, ordinary,
watching each production in private,
my own personal reflection.
 
Each dancer has their own humble story,
away from the lights, flowers and applause.
Perched on the edge of a tin bath,
leg up on the bar catching a conversation
or sat down on a rug washing their feet,
it is only a scene that Degas can tell.
 
I am more like The Snail,
the shifting shapes of primary colour,
ever in motion and twist
across an expanse of empty white space,
always pursuing this something other
ever so slightly out of reach.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 17: Eyes without & other poems

 
Day 17 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt:  The surrealist painters Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington moved to Mexico during the height of World War II, where they began a life-long friendship. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem themed around friendship, with imagery or other ideas taken from a painting by Carrington, and a painting by Varo.
 
 

Eyes without

Eyes out of glasses,
abstraction without guise,
a near-sighted flirtation
bereft of Confucius says.
 
Imagination surprises, implies
a conversation takes place,
this meeting without minds.
 
Glasses flutter their eyelashes,
masked in mascara, witnessing
cosmetic lies in transfiguration.
 
Old blue eyes never knew
what he leant his signature to
until they sat on a tabletop
suspended in thin air,
eager to take flight.
 
 

Scarlet

She unwinds a ball of blue wool,
protector of sea and sky
in search of the waiting shore.
 
It sneaks inside his ribcage,
piercing all his guarded walls,
knocks until his world opens wide,
a corridor into the dark,
his twisted labyrinth.
 
From its depths flies one red falcon,
trailed by a single white dove,
passion and peace out of balance.
 
He is but shadow,
a disembodied ghost of memory,
her melancholy, her wanderings,
her protector in the darkness.
 
Like a shawl, her red hair trembling
touches the seat of the chair,
anchors her in this world.
 

 

The wheel

Bringer of night’s curses,
fireworks implode into pitch
around his skeletal endeavours,
splatter the blood of his foes,
stuff of nightmares, grating,
all engines of power paralysed.
 
He carries hate as his holy shield,
seeks to neuter the gods,
protects no one, tells no tales.
 
Traversing the nine levels of hell,
he pursues light in darkness
to quell and destroy,
the great wheel of bones turning
where no tide will ever flow.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 4: Depth

 
Day 4 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: In her poem, Living with a Painting, Denise Levertov describes just that. And that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art on its walls, even if it’s only the photos on a calendar. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.
 
 
Depth
 
Inside & without,
exert & exhale,
alert in the delivery,
living the heat, the expel,
of light, emotive, vision,
mixed in a fistful of paint.
 
You step in,
walk on water, flow,
wade into depths of you
& spill your insides out,
sweep your arms in pigment,
become the palette knife
that drips your blood on canvas.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2025
 
 

NaPoWriMo Day 3: Meld

 
Day 3 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: We challenge you to write a poem that obliquely explains why you are a poet and not some other kind of artist – or, if you think of yourself as more of a musician or painter (or school bus driver or scuba diver or expert on medieval Maltese banking) – explain why you are that and not something else!
 

Meld

I am sculptor,
a welder of parts
that do not fit,
until they do.
 
Disparate dead things,
alive in the imagining,
lock metal, refashion,
erase the truth of things.
 
Solids evolve hollow,
cling to their opposites.
Stone breathes curves
beneath his hands.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 2: Mr Mouse

 
Day 2 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Anne Carson is a Canadian poet and essayist known for her contemporary translations of Sappho and other ancient Greek writers. Consider this version of Sappho’s Fragment 58, to which Carson has added a modern song-title, enhancing the strange time-defying quality of the translation. The poem directly addresses the Muses. We challenge you to write a poem that directly addresses someone, and that includes a made-up word, an odd/unusual simile, a statement of fact and something that seems out of place in time.

 
Mr Mouse
 
It is not his house,
but he acts as if he owns it.
He’s stamped his prints on it,
this cheeky teensy dormouse.
 
His nibbles speckle the kitchen lino,
pyramids of crumbs nest in the corners.
Follow these trails to the inner wall,
the hole that gives clue to his bedroom.
 
We never actually spy him.
He only creeps out while we’re dozing,
so we look out for his daily efforts,
his little eccentricities and squidgy presents.
 
He is the pet we never asked for,
but he fits in snug with our cosy clan,
never asks for anything, isn’t noisy,
keeps to himself and lets us run the show.
 
It is not his house,
but for some reason he has chosen us,
this invisible imp of the wild,
who sneaks around, so shy of nose.
 
One day we will set up a mouse-cam
to investigate what he does each day,
but for now we’ll indulge his privacy
and maintain our love of mystery.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 24, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 1: The school show

 
Day 1 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: We challenge you to take inspiration from this glossary of musical terms or this glossary of art terminology and write a poem that uses a new-to-you word.

 
The school show
 
We will start with adagio,
step up a little to adagietto,
before andante blends into moderato,
ambitious to lift to the next level,
but before it we will falter and revel,
a little reckless, a little tart,
a little eager to be the upstart
who begins the ride but will not finish,
who yearns to sing yet will only diminish
this song in front of our audience of teachers,
peers and parents – all our careful owners,
because they all want something from us,
so expectant, so eager to receive without fuss.
The reckless soul within us dares us to withdraw,
to leave the open stage to silence as before,
and a big, bold question mark.
Everyone will wonder how to fill the dark,
the wide open space we’ve deserted for a lark.
Maybe one of our parents will walk up for fun,
grab the mike and show us how it should be done.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 25, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 21: Say cheese

 
Day 21 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Sawako Nakayasu’s poem Improvisational Score is a rather surreal prose poem describing an imaginary musical piece that proceeds in a very unmusical way. Today, try your hand at writing your own poem in which something that normally unfolds in a set and well understood way — like a baseball game or dance recital – goes haywire, but is described as if it is all very normal.
 
 
Say cheese
 
Take a piece of cheese and balance it on your nose.

See how that goes. If you’re hungry, try to lick it with the end of your tongue. Jiggle it. Just a little bit.

Invite passersby to watch, take out their mobile phones and photograph you for retrieval on Instagram. To caption. To label. To honour. To push to every corner of the hungry globe.

Make a wish to the cirrus clouds surfing the big blue. Hop on the nearest unicorn (ask permission first) and take a one-way ticket to the Milky Way. Do not nibble it on arrival. It might spoil your appetite.

Believe in yourself. If you can’t do that, believe in the person standing next to you. Or your cat. On second thoughts, believe in your cat. He will know the way forward. He is zen. He outclasses us all.

Dream upon the figure eight. Learn to skate. Unearth the deepest recesses of your mind and then realise you’re far too late to dig out those old memories because they got clouded by too many glasses of Pinot Noir.

Sleep. Wake up. Sleep. Make up. Sleep. Touch up. Sleep. Take up a new hobby. Revisit an old one. You’re never to old to reinvent. Unless you think you’re old. Then it’s a whole new avoidance sport.

Think of your favourite pet from childhood. Revel in the thought that you might meet him or her in the Milky Way on your unicorn. You have far to travel, but you’re almost there. Just one more Curly Wirly.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 20: Broken music

 
Day 20 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Below, you’ll find Theodore Roethke’s poem, In Evening Air. The rhythm is odd, the rhymes are too, and the language is strangely prophetic and not at all “conversational.” Your challenge is, with this poem in mind, to write a poem informed by musical phrasing or melody, that employs some form of soundplay (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration).

 
Broken music
 
1
 
We walk among the skinny sacred trees
within a kind of broken music.
This life exists outside of time,
caught in the hum, the gaps between lines,
our own limitations endless –
the potential of things greater.
 
2
 
Something tells me that you’re listening.
It’s a crackle in the air sometimes,
a twig caught in fire,
scarlet embers betwixt times,
when the Wheel begins to yearn to turn,
its axis never spinning out of echo.
 
3
 
We walk barefoot, others skinny dip,
set the woods in motion with our script,
endless. It’s all a dream conjured,
a dizzy ride of travelling planets
shielding the moon gathering her boa of starlight,
unkempt, naked.
 
4
 
And so we are one sometimes.
If we want to be. If time prevails to be so.
We set the world’s tightrope in spin,
cancel all our obligations to dream.
See our plight. Feel the hour of our being.
Be at peace in your waking.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2025
 
I took the phrase ‘broken music’ from In Evening Air

NaPoWriMo Day 19: The Zodiac

 
Day 19 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Write your own poem that tells a story in the style of a blues song or ballad. One way into this prompt may be to use it to retell a family tragedy or story, or to retell a crime or tragic event that occurred in your hometown. (AABC form)

 
The Zodiac
 
In the zodiac twelve signs are seen,
but he is etched number thirteen,
the most deadly, invisible,
hunted but never identified.
 
Probably thinks he’s invincible,
living without moral principle.
Napa County didn’t see him coming,
tried to steal five souls in just one year.
 
He sent threats to the newspapers,
teased them, included complex cyphers
to show how intelligent he is,
how the wise could not outwise him.
 
He claimed 37 victims in 1974,
though the police disputed this number,
as if he wanted it to be more,
wanted to have the highest kill.
 
They tried to catch him on the hop,
but suddenly it all came to a stop.
So, what became of the Zodiac?
Could he still be out there?
 
Who, in the end, was he?
Did he know you? Did he know me?
Maybe you crossed him in the street,
maybe you sat down with him to eat.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 18: Scotch mist

 
Day 18 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Like our villanelle prompt from a week ago, this prompt plays around with song lyrics, but in a very specific context – singing while riding in a car. Take a look at Ellen Bass’s poem, “You’re the Top.” Now, craft your own poem that recounts an experience of driving/riding and singing, incorporating a song lyric.

Lyric from Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car – ‘I wanted a ticket to anywhere’.

 
Scotch mist
 
I wanted a ticket to anywhere
& anywhere was where you wanted to go.
You had a plan to strike out hard,
drive from the Dover cliffs to Germany
& back, but the autobahn got flooded,
the centre of Europe a bowl of water.
They say it’s all in the timing,
so we were already out of time.
But I wanted a ticket to anywhere
& you asked me to go for a ride.
 
You’d never been to the Scottish Isles,
land of kilts, Nessie & whiskey clouds,
drew a red ring around it on a map,
tricked me that we were staying in B&Bs
only for me to find a tent on the backseat.
Map reading became my thing,
an art I never thought was my forte,
& we never got lost. Not once.
I wanted a ticket to anywhere
& I guess you just needed a guide.
 
I’d only known you a few weeks,
but you had a face I could trust.
You drove like a rally driver,
as crazy energetic as your shagging,
played the same CD for an entire week.
I’ve never been able to play it since
cos life on repeat seldom rings true.
It doesn’t survive the humdrum.
But I wanted a ticket to anywhere
& you gave me a ticket to ride.
 
I was Laurence of Arabia bereft of desert,
snug in our tent, kind of romantic.
We had mountains that soared purple & blue,
kept awake by a million bleating sheep.
I never knew they had so many different voices.
You bullied me to the top of Ben Nevis,
unable to walk behind me for long,
freaked out by my “jelly-leg” walk.
I wanted a ticket to anywhere,
didn’t know it would be 1345 miles up.
 
We took the safe route up. I insisted,
while grown men arse-slid down the silt.
You’d rather launch yourself off the edge
into the invisible endless nothing,
but I reined in your adventurous streak.
At the top I was rewarded with mist,
nothing to see in any direction.
A stranger gave us Cadbury chocolate.
I wanted a ticket to anywhere,
but I was far too tame for you.
 
It wasn’t our journey that mattered in the end,
the verdant forests, bubbling waterfalls,
steep chasms, striking heights & traffic jams,
but the people it brought who stayed far longer.
They lasted, while our fire blew out fast.
So that was the reason I met you,
besides earning my camping badge.
We were out of time from start to finish,
but I wanted a ticket to anywhere
& it brought me something money can’t buy.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 23: The bird

 
Day 23 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: Humans might be the only species to compose music, but we’re quite famously not the only ones to make it. Birdsong is all around us – even in cities, there are sparrows chirping, starlings making a racket. And it’s hardly surprising that birdsong has inspired poets. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that focuses on birdsong.

 
The bird
 
He thought he couldn’t live without her,
after she left, without a murmur.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon,
the sun was high, and he somehow knew
she was gone before he looked about,
before he found her scribbled note.
She accused him of being ‘bloody boring’,
not caring, not noticing, just not being.
 
And that was that, his Ruth was gone,
but outside that putrid sun still shone.
A soft breeze blew through the open window
and down the sidewalk he heard the people go,
gliding, their endless chatter a rising stream.
The day suddenly seemed an empty dream.
 
It was a necessary clearance, he decided later,
when weeks had passed and he called the realter,
but reconsidered it – this was still his home.
It wasn’t like him to just sit still and moan,
but he could not endure this silence unheard,
so he went out and bought a brand-new bird,
an emerald budgie, the first pet he’d ever owned,
and to him his heart this little bird loaned.
 
He made sure to keep the cage door wide,
so Fred could fly free, and roam and hide,
taking the apartment in strong, swift laps,
landing on the heads of any visiting chaps,
so he could ruffle their greying hair and sway
back and forth in his own endearing way.
 
Fred was far less bother than a wife.
He never nagged, contradicted or caused strife.
Fred never said he was wearing the wrong tie,
saying a stupid word or just being the wrong guy.
A budgerigar won’t ever embroider the truth,
not like the porkies drawn up by Ruth.
She lied many a time about the delivery driver,
giving him a much bigger tip than the usual fiver.
 
“Don’t forget to wipe your feet,” Ruth would shout.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” he’d whisper about.
 
If he was in a happy mood, Fred knew.
He’d wing it. Round and around he flew.
If he was feeling that life got colder,
Fred would perch upon his shoulder.
If he was feeling a bit waylaid,
Fred would nod at everything he said.
 
Unlike his wife who had too much to say,
moaned at everything and called it a day,
Fred would never screech, demand to be fed.
Even when the bird pooed on his bed,
he knew it was nothing personal.
If his wife saw that, he’d take the fall,
because she blamed him for everything.
Now, any criticism was just water off his wing.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 23, 2025

NaPoWriMo Day 22: Hear the dragon roar

 
Day 22 of the NaPoWriMo challenge at www.napowrimo.net.
 
Prompt: In her poem, Thanking My Mother for Piano Lessons, Diane Wakoski is far more grateful than I ever managed to be, describing the act of playing as a “relief” from loneliness and worry, and as enlarging her life with something beautiful. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem about something you’ve done – whether it’s music lessons, or playing soccer, crocheting, or fishing, or learning how to change a tyre – that gave you a similar kind of satisfaction, and perhaps still does.

Hear the dragon roar
 
It was a balancing act,
human versus bicycle,
this steel dragon once so reliant,
always doing my bidding,
now a scarefest on two wheels,
stabilisers deftly removed by my father.
 
It stood still, silent, kind of judging,
suspecting it wouldn’t be upright much longer.
I think my dad knew too.
But he just watched. He didn’t judge.
I took a deep breath.
Dad held it steady. I needed that.
 
I remember the wobble, the veer, the jiggle,
the tremble, the twist, the inevitable splat!
You spent quite a lot of time on concrete
when learning how to tame a bike,
unstabilised, untethered,
a wild horse exerting its will.
 
It was one of those passages into adulthood,
the bye-bye, sayonara, to those extra wheels
that said you were still a child.
I wasn’t claiming to be grown up.
I knew I’d never be a contender for the Tour de France.
I’d spend a lifetime sucking mud.
 
But it was sweet when that metal machine stayed up.
Jaws silent. In motion. Reliant.
Steady as she goes.
We’d speed down the steepest, highest hill,
kinda dizzy with the thrill of it,
free as the wind.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, April 22, 2025