The March wind
gives whispered
voice to the pines
and blows the last
winter purity
of their spirits
through me.

Government curfew
has filtered the air.
New life is greener,
in vibrant sheen
and impatient
buds strain on
the pagan command.

Still, the waves
struggle against
a Northerly offshore.
Spray spat
back to sea
in the scream
of a naked sun.

Ronnie Smith
©️March 2021

Dry-stane, black after a week
of rain, stretched across wild,
pounded grass still shaking
in the heavy mist that interrupts
the goading of the skyline.

Oily wafers of granite, slippery
footholds on cold razored edges,
waiting to slice foolish flesh. A palm
dipped in the roaring burn. Blood
and fragments of lichen staining

an unwashed hankie. Kneeling
in the pearl-drops of a lanolin
sheep trail. Validating pain then
untreated puss to come. But
the summit so close before dark.

©️March 2022

Watching a tired
sun slip into the sea,
I expect music.

Arvo Part perhaps,
Fur Alina, but the
silence is more, more

profound. Broken
by a laughing sea gull
on a shuttered balcony.

Ronnie Smith©️March 2021

The rag-doll end

of a child’s life in the night,

covered by eternal grey

rubble and dust of a home

collapsed by a coward’s

anonymous bomb,

cannot be discussed.

There is no dialectic

in a sunless dawn.

No slimy trail of partisan

reason on Zoom. Only

purest truth breathes

in the icy air. Only the

silence of tears follows

the sirens. Only profound

knowledge of what we are

rises in the halogen.

©️March 2022

I saw an advert on TV the other day through which a famous and long established European electronics company tried to convince us to buy its new hair dryer.

The wonder of the device is that it possesses a sensor that ensures that it propels hot air on to each sector of our wet heads in the most efficient proportions, thus ensuring that all of our hair dries at exactly the same time.

I thought about the amount of financial investment and deployment of other resources required to design, produce, market and distribute this product. I also thought about how we as a species refuse to take the destruction of our living space on this planet seriously. About how our major corporations often refuse to allow generic versions of their most useful, life-saving products to be manufactured and sold in the poorest countries in order to protect their profits. About how many of the most important decisions are taken and the greatest investments in our world are made on the basis of self or corporate interest rather than basic need.

I imagine the smart European hair dryer will be a success in its targeted sector of the market. But as the world burns and floods around us, more severely each year and viral diseases once thought impossible ravage our populations, I just wonder if any but a few of us are even remotely interested in saving ourselves.

Black February clouds

have patched the land

into scurrying moods

of shade and glare, sent

down from the North.

Confusions of crows

flap among the trees

but, intransigent,

the Buzzard disdains

on his budding branch.

The sun catches rain,

above the folds of Cevennes,

throwing its full palette

on a canvass of space.

Fresh, unframed, priceless.

Ronnie Smith©️February 2021

For a moment,

in the front row

of class, she pulled

one side away.

To raise her water

bottle to her lips.

First time in months

I’d seen her face.

Older, skin starved

by filtered air. A

thin muffled voice

without expression.

Exuberance crushed

under daily confinement.

The validity of shared

smiling, denied.

Expertly, she re-hung

the elastic on her

flaking ear. Anonymous

again, like the others.

Ronnie Smith©️December 2020

Naked, in a cold

sun. Stripped

of its bark, stern

firm in the sand,

roots petrified

by the salt.

Brought here

by the mystery

of currents. And

the shooosh

of melting waves,

captive of the tides.

Ronnie Smith©️December 2019

We gathered in darkness

at the library, as high tide

sprayed across the street.

Singers and collectors prepped

to remind the town before

service on the second Eve.

With broken voice, I knocked

doors and rattled my tin as the hymns rose into the night.

And the simple, singular joy

of it bred the wonder of why…

Why only once a year?

Ronnie Smith©️December 2019

The black water

flees the rippling loch,

in the long shade,

the silent witness,

of the western ridge

The brief river splits

the lush dancing grass

in its endless rush

to the bay, a genesis

of life in every direction.

The scattered stones

of houses destroyed.

Timbers, long embered

and cast, as their families,

by the Sutherland storm.

Only the river course

remains. Cold north,

where the sea takes it,

as it scattered their

spirits, to a new world.

Ronnie Smith©️December 2019