I have a great love for poetry. It conveys so much in such a compact way – aside from those long tone poems we were made to study in days of yore! Even then stanzas leapt out at you. Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur and Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, appealed to my dramatic temperament and lit up a love for verse that has never been extinguished.
I have written poems at various times of my life, when moved to do so. I never know when the muse will strike. In earlier days I carried a notebook around with me in case a fit-of-the-poetics came over me. Now I use the notepad on my mobile phone. How times change! Yet the place from where the inspiration to write arises – heart and soul – never does. That, thankfully, cannot be tampered with.
I go through periods where poetry is all I want to write and other times when I need to leave it be for a while. 
In the first Lockdown last March I spent many hours walking through the footpaths and surrounding countryside in Upper St Leonards. All through that time I watched nature press up from the earth, stretch the fingers of bare branches, plump out shrunken hedgerows and everyday I saw walls and fences sprout little flowers from infinitesimal cracks. I wrote about it – not poems as such but with a lyrical turn of phrase that one might call poetic. I posted these almost daily walks, with accompanying photos, to Facebook. I had never used Facebook in that way before, but it gave me a focus, a raison d’être, and I believe gave some pleasure to those who came across the posts. The plan is to publish these walks on my site at some point.
In the meantime, I was looking through my poems, spread out over many folders at different times in my life and the one below leapt out at me. It was commissioned for Where the Wild Flowers Are, a project devised by Clare Whistler for The City of London Festival, 2012, celebrating all the wild flowers that used to grow in the City’s churchyards. Each poet was designated a single flower. Mine was Wild Mignonette, a flower I had never consciously seen. A humble little flower that might be passed by without a second glance. Each poem was either set to music or performed and danced to in different City of London churches. A Wildflower Anthology of all poems was published for the event.
Reseda Lutea* Returns to the City 
*Wild Mignonette
Nature sows, earth grows
wind carries, seeds tarry
ground accepts, water wets
time roots, plants shoot
earth powers wild flowers
green stems, yellow hems
clump together, summer weather
bees alight, butterflies white
mignonette – dry steppes
meadow grass, stony paths
wasteland, clay, sand
train tracks, between cracks.
In the city, what a pity
law sours wild flowers
man weeds, roots cede,
stone stark, nature dark
flowerless, years pass
man sees man’s needs
very pretty, in the city
man sows, nature owns
time roots, plants shoot
hand in land, land in hand
nature sows, earth grows