Brian Turner: Four Poems

Birds Bathing

A friend reports watching “a conflagration

of birds feasting, fighting and bathing

in their personal lake”. And I’m eyeing

 

my blackbirds, fussy frenzied delinquents

flinging food scraps from the compost heap,

a speckle of sparrows pecking seeds

 

and my ginger and white long-haired puss

sleeping under the scruffy hedge. All

are oblivious of a continuation of clouds

 

and showery spasms of rain slowly descending.

Brian Turner

 

 

Advent

I can’t watch the sun going down

as reds and greens and yellows

merge because feelings informal

and formal crowd in and remind me

 

of who and what I’m missing,

of what can’t be guaranteed,

of what hurts and keeps on hurting

when you’d sooner not know

 

how much goes down the chute

marked unrequited, the chute in which

pity foments and what’s pitiable

lasts far too long, won’t be forgotten

 

no matter how much and how often

you wish the sun hadn’t set.

Brian Turner

 

 

View from a Retirement Village

I can hear the ocean,

watch the cruise ships

pass, heading south,

their passengers on a trip

of a lifetime. Here,

lift doors closing

make more noise

than the residents,

my mother especially.

 

As for me, I’m managing,

just, to make do

where I am, in a small

town up country, where,

some say, there’s nothing there.

 

As for my mother,

who’s no complainer,

she’s not where

one commonly enjoys

the happiest of days

because … everything’s

just too real.

Brian Turner

 

 

If Only

You’re hearing the future’s

all about local communities

coming together, avowing

to work for the common good,

and the wind in the trees

huffs if only, and the trickle

from a backwater chuckles,

not much of a current thus far.

 

It’s been a mostly sunny

early summer’s day, and

the sparse sampling of clouds

disporting over the mountains

in the last of the sunshine

suggest communion’s fine

when there’s no coercion

to speak of, and on my stereo

Mahler’s 4th’s richly melodic,

the way one feels when in love

with whom- or whatever,

past and present, and you’re

moved to the point where,

bashful, you fight back tears

every time you think, if only.

 

Brian Turner