Today’s three poems from Felixstowe Café Poets all use significant objects as triggers for a consideration of love. Deborah Wargate’s poem is set outside using the beauty of nature, found in those blue peacock eyes and the blue bell, to remind the speaker of a love that might have thawed those long, cold nights in another world. Tim Gardiner’s spare poem reveals the pain of separation provoked in the speaker by nature’s harsher qualities, the bird’s screech and the rain. The unanswered insistent question is one many readers will have found themselves asking at some time in their lives. Ron Davis’ poem focuses on the flightpath of Cupid’s famous arrow. It plays with rhyme and explores the pain of love with arch humour and wit – Alexendra Davis
The heart of it
Peacock feathers fall.
Blue eyes meet across the green
Clasped Grasshoppers’ heads.
Were I another
Without clear commitment’s ring
You’d be the blue bell
Calling in spring from winters’
Long, cold nights and frosty morns.
By Deborah Wargate
Oystercatcher
outside
an oystercatcher’s
shrill screech echoes
across the estuary.
Do you think of me?
rain bothers
the cold pane
I lay sleepless
thinking of you.
Do you think of me?
By Tim Gardiner
Love’s Misdirected Arrow
I chanced, yesterday, on an old friend of mine
(At school we were comrades in the same class)
He said, “I’m in love, and, whilst love is divine,
It is, for me, also a pain in the… derrière.
You see, the celestial bowman had aimed for my heart
(An acceptable target for the arrow of love)
But just as he loosed his well-flighted dart
My rival in love gave his elbow a shove.”
And now I find I cannot sit down in the bus
Because of the pain in my gluteus maximus.
By Ron Davis
Felixstowe Café Poets are your local community poetry group providing meetings at a venue where working poets can read the poetry they write, poetry written by known published poets and sometimes look at a particular published poet’s work and discuss. We have also published an anthology of our own work. We welcome lovers of poetry, writers of poetry, published or unpublished and we have a great time meeting/reading/sometimes commenting/on poetry read at our meetings. His Lordships Library at the Orwell Hotel is where we meet 3rd Thursday of each month and entry fee is £2.50 per person per session. Did you see and hear us at last year’s Festival? Look out for our 2016 event when the full festival programme’s released! – Penelope Cutler (FCP Founder and Organiser)
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