Adam Ward

 

Star-spangled cylinders

Let’s fight Western style:
dominance from a distance
missiles without empathy.

Gravity doesn’t look
to see if Newton is waiting
under the apple tree.

Star-spangled cylinders
don’t care if the streets
are filled with guns,

or women clutching hands
with a sugar-smiling child,
or a father buying toys.

I would like humans
with less discrimination,
and bullets to have more.

 

 

 

The simplest of things

 

Don’t build a palace with marble and gold.

Begin with the music that feathers the breeze,

or the bicycle-bell of a wine glass toast.

 

Knead clay made of warm days on the grass,

and the sun’s lemon-light massaging your face.

A clammy clench of hands on a picnic blanket.

 

Let the foundations sit upon Sunday lunches,

the crescendo of Christmas crackers,

the falling cadence of a goodnight kiss.

 

Decorate the hall with the smell of burnt toast,

paint the walls with rouge cheeked grandchildren

as they pour sand from their shoes.

 

Furnish the room with morning-breath snores,

the bubble wrap clatter of rain against the window,

and the sky spat lightning you watch from a veiled room.

 

Tile the kitchen with the sizzle of a camera flash,

laminate the floor with the glossy prints,

plaster the red-eye to your walls.

 

It’s not the ring on your finger that matters.

but the circular band that your lips make,

when you shape the words: I do.

 

You can read it for yourself: Adam Ward is one of the top poets publishing in the UK small press right now, and it's a pleasure to have him back on the top UK small press poetry site. (Well, if you don't speak up for yourself, who will?) Find Adam's page on Facebook if you want more delicately nuanced sensory thrills and wordery.