C Richard Miles

At the zoo's fruit feeding time:
An ape ate a grape, .
A porcupine ate a lime,
A skate ate a date,
...

Pink cherry blossom sifts like snow
Along Rosebery Avenue,
Where I am sitting on the bus
Since some poor soul's mislaid their pass
...

A bus-ride brought me Hebden Bridge again
This time in summer, though the spiteful clouds
Sheet-shrouding hilltops, half-heavy with rain
This awful August, threatened they dare drown
...

Caterpillar, caterpillar, crawl, crawl, crawl;
Don’t fall off the garden wall.
Caterpillar, caterpillar, eat, eat, eat;
Grow so fat on your furry feet.
...

We sometimes say we need a change,
As a change is good as a rest
But often fail to ponder
If change is for the best.
...

Now let me taste the tones of spring,
The tang of birdsong, as they sing
In liquid lyrics; let me sink
To sup that succulence, and drink.
...

Since it was fashioned on the turner’s spinning lathe
The old, ash walking-stick has wandered many miles
On bracken banks, in frost-glazed fields, by heather moors
And waited while I clambered on unsteady stiles.
...

I am a goldfish; I am swimming around this bowl. It is getting dizzy.

A goldfish I am; It is getting dizzy. Swimming around this bowl I am.
Am I a goldfish? I am swimming around this bowl. It is getting dizzy.
...

Cry, for the countless citizens
Of broken, battered Burma
Who call on you to pity them,
With resolutions firmer,
...

Waiting,
at the shelter,
staring down the road,
for the late village bus.
...

As the trailing traffic trundles
Slug-like slow through humdrum London,
Serpentine, so slowly snaking,
As the working world is waking,
...

Though quite a Europhile, I'll willingly admit
One thing the single currency just cannot do
Though, sadly, truth to tell, the self-same problems sit
Within the British monetary system, too.
...

They used to call you Cottonopolis,
My Manchester, in that far-distant time
Where smog from smokestacks, gathered grease and grime
In consort, stalked your tawdry terraced streets.
...

Cross words cross across crossed wires.
Cross-purposes cross reconciliation off the list
as, crosswise, clockwise and counter-clockwise
fight for costly cross-border dominance.
...

A month to Christmas
And commercialism
Starts to festoon our streets
With all its frippery.
...

How is it that we poets seem to be
Mere transient custodians of poetry?
For succinct words and phrases seem to fly,
Like unannounced meteors from the sky,
...

It’s a grand morning now,
But it promises rain,
So let’s make the most
Of the hours that remain:
...

When we were young, we climbed on walls
And scaled the splashing waterfalls
But in these days, the kids are bores
And watch TV and stay indoors.
...

The pond seems still beside the pale brown reeds
Still sleeping drowsy from their winter rest
Yet it is spring, so soon from dormant seeds
New shoots will sprout while birds will build their nest.
...

After I heard Harry’s limerick,
I found that my mind set to simmer. “Rick, ”
I said to myself,
“One might write it itself, ”
...