Arthur Horne

 Dancing Girl

 Dancing Girl

For it is to you this music speaks the most.

Its rhythms drive your developing legs

Tiny now in sports clothes, feet in tennis shoes.

You have sunshine in your face and your mother’s eyes

Standing still at first beneath our barrage of country rock

The knee began to swivel in time to my suede shoe beat

My guitar became the baton as the melody propelled you

You understood the feeling that the old song contained.

What age are you, three? Your family has already enriched you

With the drive of rock, the swing of jazz, the waltz of country

It will not pass away from you, you too will play

No safer bet could I ever find of the performer you will become

This is the finest gift my music has ever brought me

To propel a child with vibrant songs in the setting of the street

This busker’s dream to have a liberated tiny dancer

At ease and in love with the song and dance we make.

 In the nature

 In the nature

 In the nature you say .

In the nature in the French way .

Giving nature your full attention.

A definite article .

In the nature my lover says.

You say that in my company

When hand in hand

We do what is beautiful to me .

To see you run aside to pick a pebble

Of great beauty from its place beside the sea.

You hold that stone, you hold it up to me .

It has the nature written there

You interpret it for me.

The band of white, the peeping shell

A crevice that the sea engraves

From countless tumbles in the waves.

The nature brushes back your hair .

To frame your face bronzed by her air

From sun and wind the nature makes your picture a masterpiece to me.

Painted there are all the years that have been and still remain

Whether active or asleep

The work of the nature rests on you.

In the nature you move .

In the nature of your coloured days.

Your busy fingers caressing earth

Your urgent legs propelling you

From place to place in nature’s ways.

It calls to you to follow wind.

It invites you in, it drives you on .

The nature is your constant friend

And murmurs in your darkest times.

Wood, earth, rock, sea, wind, sand,

Mountain valley, hill, shore.

In the nature you find yourself

You are all of these and more.

It turns you, it spins you round.

The dizzy dance of the nature partners you.

Together, rising then dipping low

You taste the air, you stoop to sip the waters flow .

You let the water cool your lovely wrists

And invigorate your delightful toes.

Fast eyes you have to follow birds

Who circle in the nature’s sky.

Their bodies harnessing the rising air

They climb upon this swirling stair .

Then from their vantage point

They dive through mist and wind and rain

To land on nature’s earth again.

I see my lover through flashing eyes

At that virtual place where horizon lies .

She scans the line and draws it

With virtual brush or mental pen .

She gives it edge, she shades the line

And colours it with blues so fine

You cannot tell what happened first

The cobalt, aquamarine, sapphire, turquoise.

All are there in the nature .

And you bring them home to me

With your joy, your beauty

Your humility, your love .

You are like the greatest book I could possess

Countless pages still to turn on .

Those read, to savour and reflect on .

To dream of to hold in my memory

You bring the nature flooding in.

As page by page new gifts you bring

From in the nature journeying

 One of those days I love

 Stretched

 Stretched 

The sea is tense today, lacking flexibility.

In a mood, strangely threatening.

Foreground figures and families normally just float across my view ,

Or walk more slowly in the thin sandy air.

A rock fisherman is bent over, concentrating,

Above where the musical sea releases its white notes.

Today I think it is the heat,

Much greater than my last visit here, which adds to the sea’s threat.

The water is warmer and seems oilier as the waves turn.

As the spume falls

The surfers are slipping unbalanced,

Rather than advancing with their customary speed.

We are trapped in an inverted fishbowl

Which I know will change from tomorrow,

Or more likely when I simply turn my chair around

And look away for a moment.

Possibly you will arrive from where I left you

Frustrated by my change of mind over aperitifs.

I would like some days to follow one another

Where the home tension does not spill into my contemplation of the sea.

Many explanations for my own tenseness or terseness suggest themselves.

Not enough sleep in a too hot room.

Worries about the means of living. 

Responsibilities I struggle to attain or fulfil.

Lack of consistency in understanding relationships.

Fear of living

Fear of pettiness

Aging

It is all a part of what the sea reminds me about.

Tides of life, flows of change.

Turbulence, sudden drowning.

A small distant dog has just streaked across the mid distant sands

It has livened up the scene.

Some new sounds are streaming from the sea.

I think a wind change of direction is partly responsible.

I am certainly not responsible.

Not in these trousers anyway.

 Do we see the same thing

 Do we see the same thing

There is colour in the sea that only comes from its being sea.

It waves, rolls, heaves in tides beneath the changing watchful sky.

I see it as a daily great deep theatrical production

With each opening day a fresh cast

A subtle directorial change or two in the action, dialogue

Or measure of its lines.

The audience is faithful but largely unaware of the changes.

They have paid their ticket but don't read the programme.

They will see the set and casually follow what they are coated in.

For they are anchored in themselves

Not feeling the pull of the horizon

Not anticipating the changes or mood on the stage.

Each watcher nodding like the harboured boat masts to the north.

The sun brings the biggest change, a surging of seething burning lights.

It lights the groynes and rocks and seaweeds. It burns the retinas of glassy sands.

Will you watch the sea as I do? Can you breathe before her might?

Are you ready for her changing moods, her fitful anger?

Will you bathe in her beauty and power?

I make her thus. I control her colour. I watch over her vastness.

I propel boats on her, fill her up with teeming life.

I inhabit her ,I penetrate her curves .I sink beneath the human view each day

And leave her cooling for the night.

 Art form in relationships