"There" by Horse-despiser of great seriousness (Here by Philip Larkin) with Day 30 opposite prompt.

There

Stubbornly West, to lazy auras
desire paths across fields
not stout enough to be unlabelled car-parks.
And now a velvet nameless street, that exposes
the taskless at dusk; awaiting acitivity
of brooks and bird-tempters,
air pillows, bears and chiffchaffs
and the tapering of the river's fast absence,
the depleted silver sky,
the dull untouched marble.

Dispenses to the horror of a small park
dips and spaces, wells and crevasses
failed crops - gather on open grassland
and the unbelonging from cooked saloons,
pulled down they live crooked inches,
away from pottery still walls, away from their fears:
expensive nakedness, green soft fedoras, boiled tuppences.

A healing emptiness, rural yet complex,
abodeless, here no generous strangers go
without a birth-new scentless rose.

Removal of pictures from skin,
merry wild haired husbands,
slow-aura chaff-towns,
stumbling low as pavements,
exposed grassland,
where encapsulated death
company confuses. There chaos rampant
like cold.
Darkly empty smog descends;
and inside the war's reddish invasion of personal space
the sea stealthily claims a forest.

There is fenced death:
Turned away from the sun, talkative, in my arms.

To Early Morning Fields (replacement for Day 25 - missing poem)

Back on a softball pitch.
Daydreams notched up in right field,
or the panic of being on second base
unprepared for the frenzy
of a triple play.

Bonding with team and wet grass,
with the sound of a leather ball
hit by a metal bat
in the sweet spot.

Another type of together
another sort of seclusion
moving to another rhythm.

I'm glad I've known the welcome
of early morning fields.


Thank you everyone. I loved this year and hope that some the poems I have written here become as well-loved as some of mine from last year are to me now! I've had fun. we've all worked hard. Now let's go and edit (shhhhhh!). Also made some brilliant new poetry friends on Facebook. I hope to meet some of them in the flesh sometime and would be honoured to read alongside them.  xxxxxx