Don Pearson

Don Pearson Poems

(For Julia Howe and to our grandchildren)

I am a tiger, roaring,
and you run, screaming, to hide
...

I have caught tears in my mouth,
washed in the dust of the dead,
...

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for they shall be beloved by their exploiters.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit nothing and yet be satisfied.
Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be renowned after they have been killed.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs
...

5.

(For everyone involved in Poetry Teignmouth)

They wait in ambush,
poems by writers
...

(for Suzanna)

Christmas blossom fades:
A newborn daughter cries out
...

Privatisation
Shortage of staff
Emergency repairs
Signal failures
...

(for Elvina)

Abandoned stone heads
Survey wasted treeless land –
...

Flying ant day dawns:
The glut is unheralded,
...

I offer neither jewels nor bars of gold
Wrested with men’s blood
From the earth’s heart.
...

(To Elvina, my companion along the roads we did take, and to Eldon and Alexanna, whom I love so dearly that they must find their own way, without a map.)


(ii)
...

When I’m mature and old and fat
I’ll wear a suit and bowler hat,
I’ll shave my beard and cut my hair,
Respectable (if full of care.)
Until that day, I want some fun,
For I am only Sixty-One.
...

Oh thou, my sister,
Who art not my sister,
Listen to the wise counsel
Of thy brother
...

(For all of us for whom such news has always been from somewhere else)

Reports are coming in from the UK that a large number of insurgents were killed today in an air strike. The strike took place on Teignmouth in a hitherto calm area of England, two hundred miles West of London.
An Allied spokesman dismissed claims that those who died were civilians, saying, “We had indisputable intelligence of a meeting of insurgents and carried out a precisely-targeted strike on their position.”
...

Chains of freedom
link the living to the dead,
Lorca to Dylan,
the road
...

16.

I have crafted my own cage
and locked myself within.
Sometimes April’s warmth
breathes on me
...

(For all at Brook House and Overbrook, Dawlish.)

In Flanders fields that May,
watered with chlorine tears,
...

I know from your stance, from the look on your face,
That I must atone for my sins.
The sins of silence.
...

(A forum-based role-playing fantasy adventure.
For those who have stimulated my imagination.)

Here, in this place of light and shadow,
...

(In memory of and acknowledgement to Pastor Martin Niemöller)

First they installed CCTV in Teignmouth,
To deter vandals and to catch litter louts
...

Don Pearson Biography

No chronology, but here are facets: Loving father and grandfather. Moderately intelligent, extremely stupid, former systems analyst and former heroin addict. I play squash, bridge, tennis and chess. Depression and cluster headache. I live overlooking the sea and beautiful Devon country. Practical skills in cooking and with software but in nothing else. Atheist and anarchist I love trees. I have a taste in music that ranges from Carter family, Woody Guthrie and Bessie Smith to Gillian Welch and Arcade Fire with stops at Mahler, Grateful Dead, John Martyn, Kathleen Ferrier, Massive Attack, Doors, Mozart, Van Morrison and Kosheen. I love poetry by TS Eliot, Kipling, Thomas Hardy and a very long list of poets who make me wonder why I even bother to try to write.)

The Best Poem Of Don Pearson

Tigers - For Children

(For Julia Howe and to our grandchildren)

I am a tiger, roaring,
and you run, screaming, to hide
in the place where you always hide.
I hunt, heavy footed
on hand and knee
so that you can hear me coming,
snarling, sniffing,
cold, then warmer, then hot,
breath-holdingly,
heart-stoppingly hot.
Finally, I find you and
with roars and shrieks
you are wrestled to the ground
and eaten, laughing.

Now we are tiger and cub,
together hunting mummy,
who will not hide
and refuses to be our dinner
because she is tired.
Mummy tells you,
“It is well past your bedtime.”

So I say that we
have to be tigers now
because tomorrow
there may not be any tigers
that we can be.

Mummy says, “Up those stairs. Grandad ought to grow up
and stop talking nonsense, ”
and we are both sent, irrevocably, to bed,
crying for the lost tigers
and for tomorrow.

9th October 2013

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