Tag Archives: poetry by Ian D. Hall

From On High they Swoop.

White beaked Messerschmitts

take vantage position

on the decaying church roof

as they crowd and wait

with piercing eyes

the early morning frenzy

of laid down black bags

the parcel corpses of the bread,

too far gone for morphine,

and they attack on mass.

The streets are filled with caw bullets

sprayed

and laughed by brains

so small

these creatures of the air,

and yet they know

our habits,

Your Presence.

Your life, in pictures,

is a reminder

of how I feel about You.

You are beside

My working desk,

You overlook me,

as I stretch and yawn

in the middle of the night, you

as a child

when I had to leave,

You

as an adult that has made me afraid…

Your presence

has filled me with love,

and it has driven me

to question, to anger, to fear…

I miss you always,

Scenes From A Black And White Photograph: The Sandcastle.

A memory of childhood

sets with the sun on a desolate beach

as whispers of tall grass watch over

forgotten sands

where once heavy footsteps danced

around fires and final beats of

misheard laughter, song lyrics, and confused

buckets are tapped down and moulded

into shape of turrets and invisible guards

keeping the sea and swooping bitter seagull alike

at bay.

The sands now brushed clean

by March gales, April showers

and October winds.

We were never there, just a blink

Fear Of The Calm.

The quiet

was deafening.

The silence

roared in my face

as the workman

signed off

on another job,

smiling as the payment cleared.

In fear of the calm,

the hammer and nail

withdrawn,

I turned on the radio

to thunderous applause

only to understand

that the sound

was just static,

unstill, crowded white noise

and not the end of a concert

that I had missed.

Ian D. Hall 2022.

Every Morning

Sometimes I open the blinds

to witness the dark at four o’clock

in all its stillness.

But more often than not I keep

them closed, till the Sun insists

its alive and well, screaming

into the darkness that becomes

a whisper of joyful light by the time

it reaches my ears…

and yet every morning,

long before the birds

see the march of time and early worms

I question whether 

I should continue,

every morning I ask if you

To Cut A Rug.




I tugged and pulled at the landing and stairs carpet,

threadbare, its fabric skin, hanging loosely

and unsurprisingly

it gave way easily, knowing its time was short,

revealing trapped dust of a decade’s footsteps,

up and down, occasionally falling, tumbling,

broken neck avoided by short distance

between point a and b…

The remains swept up, cleaned down,

 a vacation in a vacuum and then in the bin,

to live and decompose in a thousand years

in plastic sweat, much like the carpet I had




It Was An Odd Way To Look At The World.

I found a diary entry

dated

in black bold letters at the top

of the page, September 19th 1986.

In the mix of teenage scrawl

and practised finer examples

of handwriting to come,

I noted that

Pat Pheonix

had died the day before;

I also wrote, took some pain killers today,

is the discomfort new, or am I just

noticing it for the first time,

as my neck stiffened at an awkward angle