Poetry and creative writing by Phil Lowe
My second WordPress site created to express my more poetic writing.
As much as I love comedy and humour I find that I am not an easy laugher especially in a crowd situation. Whilst I hear people roaring with laughter around me I find myself barely offering a smile. I can’t explain this because I am amused but I guess we all respond as we do and to do otherwise would be a falsehood.
As I have got older I have discovered that holding one’s liquids isn’t as easy as in early years. Many a time of late have I found myself dashing to the loo for a wee with only seconds to spare.
To Levin’s Russian love Anna who died far too swiftly.
Accidents will happen. The blurred nature of the photo is deliberate. The bottle fell so fast it was all a blur followed by rather a lot of embarrassment.
For anyone who has ever sat in bed completely unable to sleep.
My father Robert Julian Lowe was an adopted child and looked after by a caring but religiously strict Salvation Army fanatic foster mother and her more gentle husband circa 1930/40s. I don’t actually know, because he wasn’t a person you had heart to heart discussions with, but I believe his abandonment as a child by his birth mother most likely had a profound effect on how he saw the world and behaved towards his family and work mates. We are looking at two totally different perceptions of the same person.
Although he cared for me and brought me up, originally with my birth and latterly with my step mother and new siblings, I never got to know him properly in life. Never did we have a man to man chat or have a drink together down the pub. This writing tries to express that.
“Half of mild dad? Cheers! How’s your day been son?” Echoes of a non existent past.
Poisson Mort is based on a true incident a few years ago when I was taking a Sunday stroll around the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. The boy’s voice was quite high pitched and he seemed ridiculously excited to witness a large dead fish floating upside down in the water.
When I was in my twenties I used to be very active in the Scouts and spent practically every weekend at the Scout campsite called Drum Hill near Little Eaton in lower Derbyshire. Sitting around a camp fire in a mossy stepped shell shaped hole in the woods on the edge of the campsite was a magical time full of stories, campfire songs and hot soup and camaraderie. The gathering of like minded souls was similar to that of avid theatre goers and had an ancient connection to story telling around a fire. This poem tries to re-connect with those memories. Epidaurus refers to the Greek theatre space and something sacred.
Written after walking through the snow in the evening across a city park and feeling good about life and fancying someone from afar.
Poetry and creative writing by Phil Lowe 