Stuart Miller-Osborne

With dignity he lay in the hell of another man’s war His head rested, stooped in his pewter green helmet As the battle grasses were shaken by her shallow breath He felt the ghost of her kiss on his bloodied brow   From the painting of the same name by G F Watts

Eternal Peace      (Issak Ilich Levitan) In the shadow of the church The peacock hides its full display Girl With Peaches      (Valentin Aleksandrovich Serov) She will not consume the fruit As its conversation will never cease The Rooks Have Returned      (Aleksei Kondratievich Savrasov) And await the summer birds The Reservoir      (Viktor Borisov-Musatov) Let us drink from […]

Viola (View from my Schoolroom) I could see the White Horse and the tall chimney of the cement works from my schoolroom Viola could not see these landmarks as she lived in Rhodesia Viola (Fireworks over Stonehenge) As the fireworks broke the mottled night sky Viola spoke to the moon telling it not to be […]

I Started At Dawn With Caution I Did Not Call You As There Were Many Pogroms in Phoneboxes On My Journey To Afrika I Met Cosmic Fairies In Isolation As I Passed Their Pink Mountains A Monk Stopped Me Giving Directions To The Closed Monastery Where The Cabbage Rose Grew Fragile And Unfinished

The gate by render of three steps led down to the river I did not bathe that day as I had done previously The peace had halted my activity I sat on the slender steps and awaited the ferry Which never arrived I applied for alms at my lodgings Nothing was received My host eventually […]

In this church space I see your leaves Casually spread But engraved Into the grass   I mistake your mosses For luxury cloths And hand them to the scavengers In this lower yard

The wife of a lost captain will hide in the sand and await the serpentine. When pearls cease their travel only the silence will awaken the serenity of new islands.    Notes 1/ Dona Leonor was the wife of Manoel de Sousa and was shipwrecked with him on the great galleon San Joao off the […]

Let the hasty swimmers pass They will not mock the wild fonts Nor the water levels of markets.   The silver sheen that ripples the thunder Will not disturb you In this theatre of loneliness.     It is reported that the playwrights John Fletcher and Phillip Massinger were buried in a single grave in […]

At Franks in the High Street I ate some infected mushrooms And swam in my own gravity

From the lips of his dying father he heard the sounds of the thin tide He saw the slink rats drown in the protective waters of the bay I am the curiosity he thought As his mild eyes becalmed by the sleep of the sea secured the unobtainable