Fi Phillips

The cool, sharp tang of the sea carries on the evening breeze as the husky sigh of the wind rises to drown the murmur of shallow waves. Final echoes of the sun lay weary on the water, auburn dimming to grey. Like dust before a broom, the clouds disappear, leaving only the solitary moon to watch over the night.

I wrote this in July 2000. Untouched, yet felt, a guilty glance offered with the knowledge that once accepted, once succombed, there is no going back. Untouched, once more, we talk around the heat that hangs between us, levels of meaning silently entwining, warm in our minds' caress. Untouched, we part, and sigh that friendship held our hearts in virtue. Regret is sweet, and yet I wonder.

Another poem I wrote in 1991. Laughing with shared secrets, we sprang across the moors - boots heavy with peaty-earth, faces radiant with the winter air and each other. The heather was our sampler, where new joys, unwrapped in the shivering air, were offered, tasted and savoured. Too impatient, our eyes too naked, we could not see what would become of our wilderness shared. The eager cold, goose-pimpling us, would numb our emotions, and the the moors would be scorched grey.

Written by me and included in an anthology called 'The Write Moments' in 1990/91. She left me at the school gates. Alone, with a multitude of lost faces I watched, we watched, as she, they, waved, and the gates closed like a final sentence. I, we all, turned to the tarmac wasteland, precisely traced  with circuits of white paint. Our new parent, hovering, twittering, bird-like behind immense round spectacles, gathered us up in her nestling embrace, trapping our backward glance. We became a form, as the minutes tumbled by, of black and blonde, and brown and blue. Wellies, coats, bags, hooks marked with duck-shaped stickers, and words, our names gloriously written in rainbow crayons. She was forgotten, our home maker. She did not enter our minds, was pushed out by new textures, new tastes. She was not now, but later, when we charged into the afternoon. She was waiting where we had left her, or she had left us, by the school gates.

This last week of the summer holidays has taken me away from my writing as I prepare for my children's return to school. Already, autumn whispers in with it's cool breezes but before the holiday season is over, I thought I'd share some old summer photographs with you and a poem (not written by me) too. See you in the autumn. Joy Is Measured Joy is touched through that we touch daily. golden light stripes the wall in morning as apparition appearing (though no false god this!) to silently nudge slumber with a most gentle alarm of holiday dream. was it a dream? - no matter. to heat, to water! to the green depths of lake that curtain summer stage. a dive, then first breath, the slow  blurring of edges, the lack of form between things. soon a plot unfolds. cloud and shadow scheme, draw plans on distant hills while breeze, waiting in the wing, rehearse with wave their entrance and exit, the tricky part, all the while whistling vaguely in the manner of summer. ah yes, summer....

It's the second day of July and the sun has returned. Not only that, but it's also Friday. Having drastically reduced my sleeping hours this week to get the Murdering The Text website finished, I think that today I deserve a break. I still have school runs and housework to do but just for an hour this morning, I'll treat myself to a book in the garden. After yesterday's rainy day reading, I feel like something different today. I want something optimistic, upbeat and funny. On my bookshelves, the first book that jumps out at me on this sunny Friday is Julian Clary's Murder Most Fab . Clary's fictional character, Johnny Debonair (TV's Mr Friday Night) reveals his rise to fame and descent into infamy in his revealing memoir, taglined 'You'd kill to be that famous'. It's delightfully wicked, as naughty as Clary's TV persona and very funny. My next purchase will be his second novel, Devil in Disguise Poetry is a skill that evades me but I sti...