July-August 2025
White Frost
By Camille Pissaro
It’s an old road
This road we travel
An old dustily-lit world
That it ‘round ravels
And though by shadows
It strokes its beard
To clear the settled frosting,
Age still lingers here
Where we pass it
With our loads
No strength to see the landscape
On this old road
Written 9/02/2025
Sunday on La Grande Jatte
By Georges Seurat
What see you, ye sleuths of a Sunday
Who stare at that aquatic stage
And laze on the sun’s laid rays
What are you searching for
You great drove of no rapport
With a horde of eyes never met before
You’re all come and sat well right
Men in shade and maidens sat brightly
With only spines, plaits, backs in eyesight
When will you end this flush scene
And take hold of what you gathered to see
The thrills, tears, prayers of flowing by weeks
Written 21/02/2025
Poplars
By Claude Monet
Regiments of beauty pigments
In trips of sunset bark
As plain as knobbly trees
As peaceful as my eternity
I’ll drift on by
With my feet in cool water
Written 14/04/2025
Terrace in the Luxembourg Gardens
By Vincent van Gogh
The shepherd trees in watching rows
Care for the sat and strolling
They keep in journeys green us fleeting
While beyond, the blue is rolling
They grace the hat and hair
With sweetest scent descending
And strong, brown, downwards arms
Guard pastures never-ending
Like a light, silken, summer sheet
They covet colours brilliant
Shade their treasures of passing red parasols
And comfort our estrangement
Written 9/12/2024
Regatta at Molsey
By Alfred Sisley
Let us cheer the tear-stained sky
With brilliant cries to her pale veil
Which hangs low on Earth
So lift it by your flags
Colour winds with your ribbons
Love the day to change her face
Show to her the jeweller’s waves
In which we bathe the DNA
Which once would swim
But now rows and watches
Light and dye the waters
That their mirror sky my live
Learn the ways of her little ones,
Find her way to timely fun,
And join us in the race
Written 20/04/2025
On a Lawn Bench
By Ilya Repin
The black-booted uniform peruses
With duty and vigilance of his youth
Across the mint meadow’s backing drop
His mother-in-law mends a cloth
Sat by a mirror of his future
And her youth’s daughter’s simple frock
Worn in by constant cast melancholia
Of always knowing she’s not far
From inheriting a scowling grandfather clock
And execution by bright white suits
She has read her mother’s loss
And dabs her wound with knowing the
Purity of her sister’s pores
Are radiance’s loathsome chore
So she scribes “All we are
Folds of fabric soon gone on
Sending the scribble to her sister’s suitor
Who’d have a word for her mother’s bond
Both of whom bend, sewing some
Bibs for the sister’s store
Of silks for apples in her eye
Who now sit on grass and vie
At entering their mother’s war
Against envious, seething “Holy arts”
In scowling papa’s passed-on song
Who has learnt wars don’t bud in news
Written 30/06/2025
The Crimson Rambler
By Philip Leslie Hale
I have chased the Crimson Rambler
Across this endless stair
I’ve caught the trail of her ruby ribbon
I’ve smelled her sweet, dark hair
But when I round the corners
Never is she never there
She leaves red tears in petals
Picked from her father’s home
And oft I’ve seen her bone white dress
Against the grey street stones
Then she’s gone to pick some more
And I stay here alone
I dreamt of when that Crimson Rambler
Would someday come to me
When her hat needn’t cloak her head
When her eye’s I’d clearly see
But the passing days now narrow hope
And I must do as she
Set to rambling all my life’s length
And never around corners be
Written 15/03/2025