All poems, paintings and images are copyright Thomas F. Kerr
POEMS AND PAINTINGS BY TOM KERR
THE SCARECROW
Alone and desolate,
in a field,
broken and brown
from the blade of the plough.
Black rags for limbs,
frayed and flapping;
frost rimmed against the dawn,
forlorn against the moon.
Eyeless.
Heartless.
Woodless.
His fragile form
two wooden spars,
nailed by a farmer's hand.
A bleak, unthought of cross,
reared against an iron sky.
AUTUMN
Don't talk to me about Autumn,
I've seen it all before.
I've seen the starlings gather on the chimney pots,
and on the hare scragged branches of my old lime tree.
I've seen the sun sink low over Cave Hill and Divis
at half past five.
And if the leaves are falling,
falling,
falling,
their death is no more to me
than the dying note of the chapel bell.
A leaf for every driven drop of rain.
Another Summer's knell.
OLD AGE
I am no longer fit to climb the high hills,
that I ran as a boy. This heartless alloy
of mind, wind, and limb has seen to all that, and left me alone
to carp, grump and moan at my sad, ageing lot.
And yet I must say, as day follows day, although I'm no sage,
some things, like good wine, improve with old age.
THE MUMMY
Here she lies, entombed beneath the glass
which lets me gaze and wonder
how it was she walked and breathed
so many thousand years ago.
Black parchment skin, stained straw hair, thin bones for hands,
which once had touched her world.
Strange beauty now this little princess shows.
Her former life has fled.
My wonder grows.
THE BLUE DOOR
Year after year
he whitewashed the walls,
tarred the roofs,
and repaired the thatch
of his cottage home,
till it was looking as good as new.
And every year
he painted the door
with another coat, from his can of blue.
A holiday artist, passing by saw a cottage in
ruins against the sky.
Sheep were grazing around the door,
and an empty blue can
lay on the floor.
The artist painted the cottage door
from a tube of blue,
and he thought of the man,
who years before,
had painted it too.
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE
Folk who know,
say the stars I see
in the sky at night, quite possibly,
have ceased to be.
The Milky Way, and the Little Bear
are no longer there.
They departed a million years ago,
and so - just think,
it could very well be,
that someone, somewhere, wherever it may be,
thinks the very same thing
about you and me.
'THE BUTTS', KINNEGAR, HOLYWOOD
Here, on a Sunday,
I learned to swim,
to float on my back
on my father's arm,
where quiet waves curled
over shallow sand,
and the mid-day sun
was warm on the wall,
where our clothes were laid,
with a sandwich and towel.
An airport runway
now covers the sand,
and the roar of jets
has shattered the sky.
No-one swims here now,
that day is past.
The keen craw of commerce
has swallowed Belfast.
ANOTHER DAY
All of a sudden we realise
that this is the way it's going to be
for a very long time.
The screen-curved face that we watch each day
has told us the news.
"U.N. troops have done their best
to settle a war,
and England have drawn the final test."
A butterfly trapped at my window pane
is only aware
that it wants to be free
in the cool green air.
A plane to Heathrow flies overhead,
and someone we knew and loved is dead.
THE BLIND MAN
Do you see anything?
I see men; but they look like trees, walking.
Mark & 23,24.
Not everyone who has eyes can see
the breeze as it moves through a summer tree
The planet's path across the sky
The curling waves, the robin's eye.
Not all can in the misty dawn,
'The thrush, stock still, on the morning lawn.
Not everyone with a heart can love,
When the world goes wrong,
and happiness dies;
When there is no song - no Paradise.
THE MELODEON MAN
Did you hear the melodeon man?
We danced and sang when he began
to play his tunes on a Friday night,
When we were young and the world was bright;
Or the beggar who sang "Abide with me"
as he struggled along on tattered feet,
Up the hill to Spencer Street?
Did you happen to see us playing there,
The children whose days were free from care?
Did you happen to say that the day would dawn
when we and the beggars would all be gone?
SINGING GRASS
Sometimes this terrible toil
is too much for me,
and I long for the singing grass
at the top of the hill.
At the top of the hill where
the grass bends to the wind,
and each blade
is part of a chorus,
part of a choir.
And always above
the sky is blue.
An anthem for me,
a paean for you.
THE SPACE PROBE
Frail object,
made and sent by man,
to seek and know
new worlds, new spheres,
where we can never go.
Tell us, as you pass them by,
and gaze with your computered eye,
just how the planets move around our sun.
Do you enjoy it all,
and Find some
fun in Saturn's rings,
in tawny Mars, or Venus bright,
and do you care a single jot
for mighty Jupiter's red spot?
And then at last,
when all we know has ceased to be,
spread your diaphanous wings
and journey on past time and space.
Perhaps, with us,
You'll see His face.
A PRAYER
I need a new prayer,
one that will last till the end of time.
Fill in the empty spaces.
The faces
I knew are no more,
and the words I used
when I first learned to pray,
like them,
have faltered and fled.
They are dead.
THE SMILE
My first grandchild was a little boy.
One evening,
when he was scarcely two nonths old,
he looked up at me and smiled.
The next day he was
He was buried in a little white box
In a tiny grave.
Then are rnany such tiny graves,
each one,
for someone,
a smile remembered.
FOOTSTEPS
The sky changed from blue to grey,
from white to gold to red,
each day,
each hour.
And yet each day my path remained unchanged.
Each footstep where a former footstep lay,
on rock,
on grass,
on sand.
Only on sand until the searching tide
could brush the marks aside,
saying as each ripple swelled and died,
"Come back another day."
"Come back another day."
"And do not grieve or mourn
the solitary marks made just by you.
I too remember former times
when they were made by two."
THE TRINKET
He often spoke of his boyhood days,
his holidays by the sea,
wandering under the wheeling sky,
alone and dreaming - free.
Few were told of the gentle girl,
in the bright print dress, on the shining sand;
of the tiny bauble she gave him there,
while walking together, hand in hand.
For he was a lad on a morning shore,
and he vowed to keep it for evermore.
They tidied away his potions and pills,
from the cupboard beside his bed.
No need now to keep these things,
now that he is dead.
Why on earth did he want to keep
this little trinket...tawdry, cheap,
wrapped in tissue, so carefully,
from the town he loved beside the sea?
THE SHIPYARD
To the yard,
where the great ships were being built
for peace and war,
we came, his sons,
to tell him of his brother's death.
I remember how he came down to us,
standing by the vast grey flank,
and all around the iron noise.
Three tiny specks
among ten thousand men.
He in his work-stained clothes,
with work-stained hands,
hearing the news with low-bowed head.
Now on the ocean bed that ship is rusting fast.
He and those who worked with him
as often is the way of things,
themselves lie long since dead.
THE SEA
I am a wave person
I was born out of a wave.
And now I know what I am.
The water is green,
crimson,
yellow,
and blue,
but each drop
In the light
sparkles,
sparkles white.
Sharp against black rocks,
soft on warm sand,
floating and holding,
grasping and drowning.
I am a wave person.
I travel and move
at the whim of laws outside myself.
I am above the deeps,
but beneath the sky and the stars.
Some day, I believe,
waves will die.
When that happens
I'll see the stars
from the other side of the street.