Shift

She shifts from foot to foot, her hair, hands, smile all aflutter. But her eyes are deep and dark and steady.

Only the rain

The only sound, only sensation, is rain beating on rooftops, windows, umbrellas and on the first daffodils, palely bobbing, their heads more bowed than usual.

A brilliant dusk

At dusk, the sky briefly flashes pink, orange, yellow against the weeks-old, glowering grey.

Puffy

The small girl in the lilac-coloured puffy jacket tips back her head and spreads her arms: a Spring flower opening.

Slow motion

They all walk so slowly, today on the bridge. Or am I walking faster and faster?

Author event

The famous writer has all the austere charm, the steady, dusty vivacity, of his books.

Reading on the bus

Much like the bus, the poem jerks and sways around its own axis as it moves forward on the page.

Flutter

A ribbon of dirty plastic flutters in a bare tree: I am lost and tainted.

Bells

Church bells peal, each note deepened and hollowed by this Sunday morning's thick, damp air.

Cambridge to Ely

Rain on the Fenlands. A huge, muddy sky leaks endlessly onto the black fields and tiny trees.

Crane

A crane so high I squint to see the top, and stumble backwards.

Tower

The heights of the new tower block are lost in the mist. As we come closer, there it is again, hard and overbearing.

My shadow

Morning, 7.30. My shadow, faintly, on the footpath. When did she last leave the house with me so early?

A single wing

She steps fast. The white canvas bag on her shoulder billows, away from her body and back - a single wing.

Pale sunrise

Intensifying white light, then suddenly, at its centre, a frosted-glass Christmas tree bauble.

Sunday

Necessary Sunday nothingness. As if the week, set stiff with activity, requires the admixture of empty to regain a malleable consistency.

Black dog

A black dog ambles past - heavy, porcine, rather sinister. Poor old guy. He didn't ask to be a metaphor.

Weather

The rain taps my face. The cold taps my fingers, my elbows, and crawls up the back of my legs.

Two

In the rainy pavement, the reflections of two orange umbrellas like big, wet, bobbing flowers - the people are the stems.

Evidence

Along the road, a zigzag pattern of half a dozen fallen coathangers. Someone grabbed an armful of clothes from the wardrobe and ran?

Niño

Throughout the showing of the film about the Zapatistas, the baby coos and sucks and, over his mother's shoulder, surveys the room with quiet composure.

New moon

A tiny, perfect crescent moon, straight from the pages of a children's picture book, rocks gently above the multitude of glaring sodium street-lamps.

Mean and dirty

A mean wind slaps the house and whips a mass of dirty clouds across the sky.

Mayfair carpet shops

Behind the plate-glass windows of the Eastern carpet shops, the soft, dusty weight of woven gardens in the subtlest of colours.

No harm in trying?

Outside at lunchtime, I try hard to notice something. A great big glutinous globule of effortfulness floats before my eyes.

Dazzle

Dazzling light from high above the city-centre skyline slants off the sharp, stretched-out shadows on the pavement. It's an unfamiliar contrast after all these weeks of grey opacity.

Sycamore island

Inside the front door, a huge sycamore leaf has come to rest: pale-brown and brittle in my hands like an intricate cut-out from an aged parchment map.

(I wonder if I should ban metaphors and similes here, like in strict-form haiku?)

Space

A small space, like an empty matchbox, to be filled each day with words: light them carefully, one by one.