Changeable

This one came from last night's 10-minute exercise at the Dunbar Writers. My prompt was 'hot and cold', and this is what I came up with. It's unedited.


Changeable

It was a warm morning
then a front went through
leaving hours of cool showery air
trailing behind it.

We had lunch in the garden
sitting at the table
with the wine, salad,
fruit and cheese. Balmy,

and then, little by little,
the wind rose, the sky
greyed over, and we were back
in the Pleistocene, felt like it.

The first spots of rain
evaporating on the paving,
released that smell of warm stone,
and then the spots stayed, grew.

We rushed inside, in a flummox
of plates, glasses, salt and pepper,
bowls of salads and boards of cheese,
to continue our meal inside.

You can’t recreate a picnic indoors,
the light’s not there, the sunshine
and the warmth gone, the windows
streaming with rain, chilly.

Colin Will
09/05/2013

The first post-April poem

I've got an idea for a title for my next collection, due 2015. It's The bacon bookmark. (This actually happened, when I was a junior librarian working in Bathgate). I just need to write the poem now. I know how it will end:

It could've been worse,
there was no brown sauce on it,
and it could've been a fried egg.

(We had love letters, French letters, oily bus tickets, and suspiciously brown scraps of paper returned from branches and centres, so there is a poem there waiting to be written).

However, sitting on the train in Waverley Station, waiting for it to leave for Plymouth via Dunbar and other station stops, as the 'train managers' now call them, this poem came:

[Poem removed for copyright reasons]

I've since discovered the statue is called Everyman, he doesn't have a beard, and he has brown skin. So I may need to edit this one later.