Tacking About

In internet terms, that was what you'd call a "flounce". 

The stopping was for all sorts of reasons; the re-starting is for one: to do something different.

Instead of a confessional, from now on you get a daily picture and a poem, both by me.  Same yacht, different tack.

Babysitting in Schaerbeek

From deep in the ganglia
rises to the skin a carer
chatting animated English
attempting broken infant German.

Then I'm left to Simon Armitage,
the television that two remotes fail,
the sewing that I'll never do;
der private modus browsing that I will.

The clean, twist-and-clipped tidy
silence of grateful absence.
Loud neighbourhood ghosts pass
in boots and exclamation.

A round baby raises a tower of lights.
In darkness I stopper his cries
with a luminous dummy
and he goes back down, down, down.

Drooping now over pages,
dreaming in Yorkshire dialect,
I click up, awake,
with and like the homecoming latch.