Michael Shepherd Poems

How can I COMPUTE love’s DATABASE?
Thus WATCH as saintly love, God IN THE END,
INCHes its way into immortal life’s ASSURANCE
in the seeming OYSTER of my heart?
...

His day is but a true disguise;
a quiet Sunday, uninterrupted by the doorbell,
unchained by circumstance, freed from fashion,
in loneliness so deep he can’t explain,
...

Is there a greater privilege
than to breathe sea air? And here, it’s like
a front seat at the greatest
open-air theatre in the world:
...

A hard writing I had of it;
the words clumsy, the sense banal...

escaping from rhyme isn't easy;
...

On a sunful, funful, easeful sorta cloudwhite airblue day,
we sat exchanging coinages
in a smileful, timepass way;
...

I never thought it would happen to me…
so, I wouldn’t have been reading this poem…

but now it seems it has. And now
...

... for richer, or for richer still,
in status or in wealth,
in parenthood or career opportunity,
for as long as my current commitments permit,
...

This Christmas, as ever at this time of year,
there’s a worldwide brotherhood and sisterhood
whose numbers I cannot count
and would not wish to know;
...

On a crowded commuter train
pressed between two poets;

caught too for words:
...