NaPoWriMo #6: Last Minutes of the Day

Concrete's cold embrace

stretching out to meet the sky.

Grasping at the clouds 

with fingers of steel and glass.

The towers of commerce

caressed by the last rays of day,

an orange inferno bathing the rooftops

but shading the streets.

The vacant shop fronts

with hooded figures in sleeping bags

shivering and hunched over,

silhouetted by the glow within.

The trains clatter along aching tracks,

the seagulls swoop and dive 

in the space between the towers

until at last the inferno

is swallowed by the hills beyond

and the city lights take hold. 

NaPoWriMo #5: The Lost Starling

The starling sat in the weathered oak tree
without the chirping voices of his flock.
Lost and confused and very late for tea,
he thought he might find them down by the docks.
He asked every bird on the waterfront,
from seagulls to terns to the grey heron.
After a while the starling took a punt
and followed the canal to the barrens.
There he found his flock, bristling in a tree.
When dusk fell, the starlings began to sing
and took to the air in a fluent stream,
dancing as the sun was slowly dimming.
Darkness fell and a half moon ascended,
the lost starling's search had at last ended.

NaPoWriMo #12: Severn Blues

Today's poem is inspired by NaPoWriMo's daily prompt, which asked for a poem with a lot of alliteration and assonance. I have to say, having read this back, this poem contains a lot more of the former than it does of the latter.

Severn Blues

A river emerges from the lowlands,
swallowing another as it swirls
its way to the sea
in a sumptuous symphony.

Bridges that bind the roads
in a bilateral bond
brace themselves against the barrage
of the brutal channel wind.

Across the flow of the rolling Severn,
a lammergeyer flies higher than gulls
inland across grass fires to a new roost
somewhere on a drier mountainside.

NaPoWriMo #9: Waters of the Usk

A bit of an unusual subject for today's NaPoWriMo poem, but it fits with the current theme of experimentation so why not? The subject is the River Usk, a river which flows through South Wales and out of Newport, and is famous for having the second widest tidal range of any river in the world.

Waters of the Usk

A slick of mud and soil
drained from the riverbanks
cascades from the hills
down to the wetlands,
the coils of the River Usk.

Cormorants patrol its waters,
diving for fish and eels
along the immovable mud-banks,
while terns and seagulls cruise
above the capricious tides.