This week’s poem, inspired by a beautifully sunny Danish summer morning after a row of grey and rainy days.

Sunny morning

Wake up summer Denmark, breeze is whispering at your wide windows, frosty wind has gone West, long may he stay.  Birds have called since first light – soon after you slept at midnight.

Wake-up summer sky, clouds are gone and only white flight-tracers crisscross pale morning dew, breeze skips across water, delicate footprints shimmer over restless reflected blue.

Wake up summer’s youth, put on white new graduation caps, keep sun’s glare out your eyes. Rise and shine your silver hair, your clear bright faces, find and form yourselves in groups and pairs.

Wake up summer music, lesser-knowns tuning their instruments, testing, testing, for endless festival dance days of beer and song, evening dusks that last forever but not too long.

Wake up your parents, little snow-headed, chubby-knee-ed infants, content and wanted, sand and laughter, space and carefree days, drag them out into the sunlight to eat and play.

Wake up summer’s lovers, dance in Nordic light, planning, dreaming, stretch out under trees, along flowerbeds on green lawns, let’s have some summer weddings before the autumn storms.

Amtoft 2015

For those who live and work as expats June is always a time of partings. Wonderful, interesting people who have shared our lives for some years are moving on to new posts and new lives somewhere else. It is a sad time, but it is also important to remember how rich are lives are because of all those amazing people we meet, people who we would never have come to know and love is we had stayed safe at home. This poem, an old poem from 2013, which I just rediscovered hidden away in a lost folder, is a reminder to appreciate those friends who share our path for a while.

Confluence

Sometimes lives meet like rivers,

far from source

brought together by geography,

by destiny,

by the chances of topography.

Converging  in a whirl of soul and water joined,

in waves and eddies and swirling sediments

tributaries join and twist and turn and hurtle on towards the sea.

Friendship and love and familiarity are the sentiments,

together making lives more interesting,

more complete, more glittering.

For meeting,

sharing,

parting

the journey is the richer

Dhaka 2013

tall man skipping along our path

infects us with his inner laugh

Dhaka 2014

.

In Dhaka, summer holiday is here, the International schools have closed for the long summer break and the exodus has already taken place. At the same time it is the start of the holy month of Ramadan, and those who rose early to take a pre-dawn meal before prayers are sleeping as long as they can. This Friday morning the streets feel very different to the usual chaos…

First of Ramadan

deserted morning streets

crows looking puzzled

small birds twitter inquiringly from tree tops

– where is everyone?

Dhaka 2013

This week’s poem inspired by the recent arrival of the monsoon, which this year was particularly dramatic and which I experienced from very close quarters.

Monsoon arrival

Grey dusty days washed clear away,

clouds collide, rivers rise,

dawn-birds praise fresh-rinsed blue skies.

Crisp emerald leaves emerge complete,

puddles pool, paddies flood,

seeds burst deep in fertile mud.

Birds-eye view, when Noah’s doves flew;

blinking ponds, steaming warmth,

delta’s heartbeat to monsoon storms.

Chapai Nawabganj, 2015

This week’s poem inspired by a many-hour drive through the lovely landscape of Bangladesh.

Landscape

hazy hot sky over squares and rectangles of green, brown, seedlings waving weakly above water, muddy stubble, golden harvests, sliced by brick lined bustling roads. hard trampled bunds splitting land from water, green from grey, wet from damp. everywhere lined by tall straight-stemmed timber trees, brick and mud thatch houses. corrugated and tiled roofs, shiny, rusty-rimmed sharp edges. puddles, muddled homesteads circled by dark rings of fruit trees, heavy with green mangos, wide leafed jackfruit trees with lumpy fruit-swelling trunks. sweet smell of growth battling decay, thriving dying rotting ripening, mouldy compost, flowers fruit.  irregular quadrangled deep green ponds flashing twisting fish, washing splashing, ducks, children, long black glossy dripping hair and gleaming liquid limbs. bamboo groves, sharp skin-slicing leaves, elegantly bowing yellow stretching stems. mushroom-pretty piles of rice straw, odd-angled sheds, poultry houses. knife-backed rib-caged yellow cows, grubby sheep, clucking, ducking laying, brooding hens. wide sluggish grey-green rivers meander fat and lazy through energetic country-side. heaving markets, exhaling humid heat, clinging dust. piles, sacks, bundles, bags, rice, spice, fruit, spinach, spinney-ash-snake-sweet-bitter heaps of gourd, amethyst aubergines, bursting jackfruit spewing sick-sweet breath. black-haired nodding heads, henna beards, arms legs, lean-muscled sweat-shining bodies, bangladesh.

Rajshahi, 2015

This week’s poem inspired both by memories and recent events, by observations and imagination.

Summer

This, summer of your spring time,
world opening oyster-like.
You, a perfect grain of sand.

Paths display before you,
a peacock train of lines and twirls
aching for your tread.

Limitless sky blue and
bold above you,
days that promise not to end.

Afternoons on green slopes,
lolling with beers, squinting at sunlight
and all those brilliant girls.

So much laughter,
so many friends
and every option open.

Free from academic obligations,
now it is your choice,
your own voice.

Intoxicating afternoons
with only the itch
of grass to irritate

and all the world stretched
green and tempting
at your impatient feet.

Dhaka 2015

This week’s poem, a musing on how some things just don’t seem to get any easier, no matter how long you practice and do all the right things.

Some days

It just doesn’t get easier
despite early rising,
cold morning showers,
only two glasses and avoiding
late night hours.

Healthy breakfasts with fiber,
meals more often but lighter,
still temptations linger.
Repetition fatigue cracks
in tarnished willpower.

Despite mindful breathing,
recommended readings,
muscles still ache.
Morning’s duvet clings
to sleep-loaded limbs.

Slippery slopes still slipping,
convoluted negotiations
on why today’s (not) an exception.

Despite resolutions,
plans and phased-in solutions,
despite success on success,
still, some days are a test.

2015, Dhaka

This week’s poem, written on order, and dedicated to group of extension officers who are completing a season long training in Farmer’s Field Schools from our project.

Season long

Your hands now know to dig in soil,
assess damp roots, to plant, to toil.
Text book lay closed, soft gathering dust
while you net pests, examine rusts.

Raised poultry house, neat paddy fields,
reduced spray costs and raised milk yields,
strengthen the weak, empower the meek,
de-wormed and fed young goats grow sleek.

Contacts turned friends while skills were learned,
green mangoes swelled, mist melts, sun burns.
Long laughs you’ve laughed, hard days but fun,
now wipe a tear, the season’s done.

Dhaka 2015