A Poem by Phil Poyser

Nostalgia for Our Future

On the banks of the Guadalquivir,
where the murky waters rush,
hemmed into channels by mills which turn no more,
where Roman bridge joins mosque and tower,
she came towards me, as I lay,
flotsam washed up by another lunch.
Tall, with short-cropped hair, tanned and mystical
a presence from another world,
peering into the setting sun,
upon the parapet above, she
lingered.

I gazed, admired, relished the fleeting glimpses
of our present through half-closed eyes,
drowsily devoured the fading visions of our future.
For us the gulf would not be bridged,
no lightning spark between our outstretched hands.
Like the otter's head--or water-rat's--
which broke the surface, bobbed and disappeared once more,
she clambered back, rejoined her man,
disgruntled, out-of-sorts, was playfully rejected,
embraced, and, like our still born future,
vanished.

The element, carbon, has played a pivotal role in Phil Poyser's life.  He comes from a family of miners with its roots deep in the area around the Nottinghamshire coalfields and his natal village of Mansfield Woodhouse.  His university studies at South Kensington's Imperial College of Science and Technology led to a career in organic chemistry (the myriad compounds of carbon), whilst retirement from the pharmaceutical industry in 2007 saw a move to organic gardening and the flourishing of his lifelong love of poetry:  a primrose path from C-reactive protein to C-reative Writing, so to speak.  No coincident then that he's a member of Macclesfield Creative Writing Group and an active open-miker in and around the North-West.