Day Seven

Wife Potted Garden 2 – photo by Paul Brookes

Heaven in a Spring Garden

Alice clasps her laundry load
as she steps out onto cobbled ground.

Cuplike red and yellow tulips
stand tall, silken heads nodding
in the breeze.

Wisteria threads cloak the cottage wall,
Alice anticipates their lilac bloom.

Hazy sunshine hints heat
as she pegs washing
on the line,
             white terry towels fly
in the sudden gust of air.

Cherry blossom drapes
patchwork paving–

high in the tree, red, gold
and green finches trill,
reaching a perfect cadence.

Alice leans into golden forsythia,
smells its sweet fragrance,
sunlight warms her face.

Pottering along the path to a flowerbed
by the fence, she stops, bends, sniffs,
smiles at the burnt-red azaleas,

sinks into a striped deckchair
next to blue mood pansies peeping
from terracotta pots,

picks up her paper and pen, gazes
at violas behind a white picket fence
and writes

Heaven in a spring garden

-Patricia M. Osborne

After ‘Happy the lab’rer’

My bookshelves with none of her prose
would be like a garden with no rose
bush. As the shrub grows
flowers again, I re-read her books, unlike those
of Dickens or Trollope, which I only suppose
I may. I know their plots as the gardener knows
his plots. I am glad she chose
not to marry, but wrote about love’s woes
instead, as well as its joys. Her life came to a close
too soon, perhaps in the throes
of Addison’s. A new portrait is proved by the Austen nose.
Like Emma’s and Bingley’s ‘ideas’ her poem flows.

(First published in Reach Magazine: Indigo Dreams Publishing (2021).)

-Peter J Donnelly

April reveals her new spring clothes

Breath held, tongues tied in our mouths,
we are mute observers, admiring the lustre
uncloaked before us in these clandestine woods.

Stepping from a time capsule, hesitant at first,
we stumble upon a passing dream, hear new
rhapsodies playing, experience a paradigm shift in blue.

As privileged viewers we sneak a peek at April’s new
clothes, infused with the fragrance of bluebell breath,
We will preserve these treasures, safeguard her rebirth.

-Margaret Royall

The Loneliness Of A House Plant

Above me one fish moves downward
over my head a summer returned.

Light through windows warms the floor,
the air.

I can’t flower.
Isolated in a pot.
My owner head in her hand,
A cold winter

She can’t receive my nutrients.
When she moves her air
lifts my leaves, her voice excites.

She swabs dust from my leaves.
Waters me just enough not to drown.
She opens a window and I am sensitive
to outside gusts with messages I can’t decipher.

When she laughs my leaves lift
makes them upward fish
and my buds ready to open.

-Paul Brookes

Bios And Links

-Patricia M Osborne

is married with grown-up children and grandchildren. In 2019 she graduated with an MA in Creative Writing (University of Brighton).

Patricia is a published novelist, poet and short fiction writer. She has been published in various literary magazines and anthologies. Her poetry pamphlets, Taxus Baccata, The Montefiore Bride and Sherry & Sparkly were published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press.

She has a successful blog at Whitewingsbooks.com featuring other writers. When Patricia isn’t working on her own writing, she enjoys sharing her knowledge, acting as a mentor to fellow writers.

-Peter J Donnelly

lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has a degree in English Literature and a MA in Creative Writing from the University of Wales Lampeter. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies including Dreich and Writer’s Egg, where some of these poems have previously appeared. Last year he won second prize in the Ripon Poetry Festival competition.

-Margaret Royall

Margaret  Royall has six books of poetry published. She has appeared widely in print, in webzines and  poetry anthologies. She has won or been short-listed in several competitions and her collection ‘Where Flora Sings’, published by Hedgehog Press, was nominated for the Laurel Prize in 2021. Her latest collection, ‘Immersed in Blue’ was published in January 2022 by Impspired Press. She leads a women’s poetry group in Nottinghamshire and takes part in open mic sessions online and in person. She is currently working on a third poetry collection.

Website: https://margaretroyall.com/ Twitter:@RoyallMargaret