Images & Other Poetry

Images

You spoke of them

as if they were real.

People who lived

in a sepia toned world,

pressed like flowers

behind polished glass.

Part of the furniture,

picture frames with faces,

decoration for empty walls;

growing younger by the day.

Maybe their world

was a window into mine.

I hold your photograph,

full of colour,

believing you were real,

trying to make sense

of what I feel.

Maybe you see me

in a sepia toned world;

growing older by the day.

John Lloyd Rowlands

Behind nicotine stained glass,

pictures of street parties

and the sovereign King hang

like rusted memories

on grubby walls. December 1999,

he’s 65 years and still known

as the boy who stole marbles.

He sits alone, but not lonely,

smokes air through an empty pipe,

puffs the shine from a thread

of sunlight that challenges his

preference for dark. An avalanche

of fire logs in a corner where

the piano once stood; he played once,

when his fingers were nimble

and fast as wings of a humming bird.

Now, he plays a silent tune,

perfect as his imagination allows.

In another corner, his box of marbles,

frozen together in a crust of grey.

In youth, he stepped through their

rainbows, stared into a swirl of blue,

making light softer to touch.

He sits alone in a darkened room,

and colour is nothing without light.

Rowland Hughes is a Welsh writer and poet. He was born, and lived until his late teens, in the Rhondda Valley, from where he still draws most of his inspiration. He worked as a Master Decorator and studied trades in the construction industry. He later became a Local Authority Assistant Surveyor. Due to ill health, he retired in 1997. In 1998, he joined a Cardiff University Creative Writing Group. He loves to observe people, places and nature, writing in bustling cafés and the confines of his writing shed.