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some lesser spotted verse

A triptych of small moments in domestic life

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Flight

We fed popcorn to flocking pigeons
Their wings clapped the air above our heads
You were not
In your red coats
And I was not in mine
But your eyes were all so dark
And your smiles so young
And the birds’ iridescent feathers
Framed your faces
Against the water colour sky
My daughters
Growing up, growing away
Free-wheeling into distant lives

We ran together
Across the road, shielding our eyes
From the pigeon that had been knocked down
Lifeless wings lifting and falling with the passing cars
Mimicking flight
                                                                    
© Bridget Pitt
28/03/2010
PictureDances with mantises -oil on canvas Bridget Pitt

Catching green


There was a green poem


On the sliding curve of an autumn evening
I think I glimpsed it
Lodged in the tines of my fork
Or curled beneath a glistening sliver of cucumber
Or nestled between my dog’s paws
And the lazy laughter of my girls
Or perhaps in the eddying spaces
Circling the high-diving swallows
As they gathered the last dust of summer
To take it across the seas

Well, I almost caught it
But then yielded to seeing and not watching
Not recording
Not succumbing
To the numbing of the framed moment
But letting time slip through my fingers
Without fear or grief at its passing
Such was the greenness of the poem
That I glimpsed


© Bridget Pitt


A day in the country with Judith Mason

Slow bubbles in a river
Line our passage to the gallery
To Judith Mason’s marks on canvas, and so many skulls and
Sad testimonies on those unforgiving wooden pallets

Human horror bracketed
By late afternoon dust settling through old trees
And that certain brittle restlessness
That comes, sometimes, to people who know each other too well
When they gather in hot places
To share dolmades and other cling-wrapped offerings
And contemplate an artist’s effigies of death

My daughter and her friend
Orbit our world in a sealed capsule
Send, occasionally, a small signal from space
The languid wave of a hand,
(Oh the poignancy of young girl hands
And their languor...
what is it that drags them down

Into such sultry sleepiness?)
A vague smile
to mark their tolerance of our ineptitude.
Mason’s skulls roll off them
Like pebbles in a stream
And I am grateful for their immunity
And the quietness of the day

© Bridget Pitt

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