Red Admirals Poem by Roger elkin

Pulsing heart-beats,
the isms of being; almost iambic
their blood-tick, their wing-tick –
break flash / break flash

or outstaring the day-gaze
with a vermilion blaze
upon black: the colours of poppy.

Long-tongued, seeking
the speed of flowers –
getting high on it, higher, higher,
a drugged, stumble-flight
up at the moor’s edge
with its milk-thistles, its knapweed.

(Is it purple that pulls them?)

Or gardened with trailing
skeins of buddleia (their scattered
flashes like girls parading
headfuls of hair-slides)
sudden savagery in our town;
a native face-mask, stabbing
from greenness – a pirate-slash,
a stirring of groin.

Are the splayers of flowers,
caressing petals, and stamens,
feasting their isness, their futures
with the kneading-keenness of sex.

Closed-up, are paper wafers
of bark, or Cape Triangles
of good hope. (Many the nets
we kids broke; and jam-jars
a day-or-two jungle with
blades of grass and strangled
flowers. Even then, amidst cup-handed
flutter, that out-facing, out-daring
blazon of colour gave us
tastes of excitement – the sudden
blood-bursts of cuts, that pain
of amazement.

Ageing, we add
fragilities of life,
the nothingnesses of life.)

Red Admirals, captains
of ships of youth, harbingers
of sad passages, of death.

God’s other toys.