FOUR POEMS FROM ‘A WAY LESS TRAVELLED’

Adrian Rogers

WHEN THE FLOOD CAME—AS IN A DREAM

Sodden leaved autumn, root slippery

half strips branches rain seeping

no misted magically veiling

mellow fruitfulness

only a thinly winding path down-sloped,

levelling, breaking into a clearing

as water rising

laps over fear’s primal rashness

devoid of rational lightening

dreaming a path’s aloneness

neither hearth nor home remembered

until disquiet is dismembered by hope,

the ground rising

skies cleared, rending

lead-like weighted clouds slung low

yellow sun-shafted,

defining the alchemy of confidence

rectifying the mind’s scope

as lead to gold, mastering

unexpectedness

yet in reality present tensed,

dry grounded as trees draw back

a higher clearing.

OVERGROWN TRACK

An overgrown track through minds awake

commands not

a spread-running growth of creepers

green/brown wet clinging

moss coating on rough barked trunks,

millennium lengths of dead leaf littering

the undergrowth

and overgrowth

of lichens drooping

grey/ghostly appearing

through half veiled cloud trails

falling to treetop level.

A way lightens and darkens through shake

and watery rot

of underfoot deadness, but sleepers

commune with changes ringing

as the shaken one dunks

with wetness those glittering

eyes-wide memories, the sloth

of neither and both.

Hearts welcoming pain without fearing

grasp at the rigging of love’s gilded sails,

sun and moon mesh to bevel

the gears of conscience,

light glitters in trees, and on the lees

at the bottom of a barrel.

ON HIGHER GROUND 

A sun smitten green lengthened ridge

gashing the skyline

white-yellows light-mellows slopes

ripped open by grey weathered

brokenly tooth like rocks

above dark forest waves falling back

like breakers unable to reach the high tops

as the wind sings over a bridge

onto dreaming, a fine line

crossed when a silent wolf lopes

from the wood, and un-tethered

sheep, panicked by terrorizing shocks

see the hireling flee,

and a rack outstretched comes apart,

fear stops the flowering of hope

that knowledge might be

and courage find its reward

until stolen and unloosed

from cleft scored rocks

is, unknown yet alone the real.

THE NIGHT TRAIN TO NOWHERE

Iron on iron hypnotizes

sleepers on the night train to nowhere

sleeping minds synthesizes

serpentine, long in reach everywhere

beyond hope messaging all comers

from the outermost edges of winters

and summers, layered universes,

mind driving wedges between sleeping

and waking, consciences shaking

like windblown sedges and garden hedges

iron rails emerging

through darkness surging

echoing post-modern mechanizing

for dreamers digitizing

and showering confetti

like poets devising opera libretti

weddings, births, deaths,

famous last words, last breaths,

scheming imaginers texting, fingering

for financial advantages lingering

hypochondriacs fearing infection

spirits perhaps seeing

the Bridge to Resurrection,

all drop their cover

or sleep ‘til the earth turns over.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

Adrian CedricRogers—born September 1940, in Lincoln, England, UK

I was brought up in England, but trained as a teacher in Ireland, teaching music and English in Ireland (North and South), Scotland, England, Australia, and Papua New Guinea. I am an Australian citizen, resident in South Australia where, since retirement in 2005 I have concentrated on writing, with four fantasy novels published by Double Dragon, Ontario, Canada, and two more novels published by Mountain Mist, Queensland, Australia. I have four poetry collections published by Ginninderra Press, Port Adelaide, South Australia, and contributions—both poetry and articles to numerous journals and anthologies, both in Australia and elsewhere, including ‘Homeward Bound, Searching for the Sublime, an Indo/Australian Anthology of Short Stories’, and in Australia contributing regularly to Beyond the Rainbow, The Write Angle, The Colonial Athens’, Episteme—Bharat College, and many others.

Setu, September 2016