books

My Poem ‘Balloons’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Where we have been
and where we are going
are tied together
by the threads of our lives;
while we are enjoying a good story
we never want it to come to an end;
darkness and light ties night to day
and day to night;
sometimes when we know
we are approaching the end of a great book
we will put it down and bookmark our place
so that we can pick up one day where we left off;
however, just as every writer
must finish writing their story,
every reader must follow a tale
to its conclusion,
and when they reach the last word of the last page
promise to return to the same story again and again –
the same, but different –
like periodically catching up with an old friend.

We all sometimes look at our own reflection
and do not immediately like the face that we see –
though someone else may look at the same face
and see the face of unparalleled infinite beauty;
we all should remember that a mirror
can only show us a distorted image of how we appear,
and the only true way of knowing
who the world sees when they look at us
is to go to the one person who knows us best
to describe us and tell us who they see
and what about us they most revere.

We all have reasons for what we do;
certain things and special people
have an indefinable gravity about them;
we all love people in our lives
in ways that we show every day,
but we sometimes feel a need to prove;
we all leave many clues;
I, myself, could never deny
an unbreakable connection –
once made, never severed –
because, just like the bound pages in a book,
bound people are linked forever
because that is what was always meant to happen.

Some people rise and fall by the resonance of a voice;
some hearts beat in perfect-time with other hearts,
and even when they are far-apart from one-another
they constantly sing “see you soon”;
falling in love is uncontrollable
and it is a fundamental instinct without choice;
all stories have chapters and twists,
beginnings and endings,
and some have a pace and a depth to them
that is as vast as space;
and though its true meaning and message
may not be as blatant as a telephone ringing,
the best thing about any story
under any cover is one that you can hold,
walk with, and even tie to something,
and is that which you should never let go of –
because once a story rises too high out of reach
it will become someone else’s,
and slowly drift away like the wind
carrying away a balloon of your own making.

Me

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , ,

Me-Library--bgd1

Check out my books ‘Poet of the Sphere’, ‘The Sound of Mark’, ‘The Eternal Boy’, from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk right now! Click on my picture to check out my Amazon authors page! 😊📖📝

My Poem ‘The Beach’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

It has been a beautiful day;
it has been a day to remember
in so many ways;
the sparkling and the warm sand
beneath my feet that I am sitting on
feels amazing;
the glistening golden sea
that looks as if it could be
the surface of the sun –
because it looks in every way
like an ocean of pure energy –
is breathtaking;
as I look out and I see
the most beautiful and unbroken blue sky,
my heart skips a beat;
as I close my eyes,
I am transported in my mind
to a deserted island,
surrounded by palm trees –
in my imagination, I am a castaway
living a life free to be
whomever I want to be –
I have no worries,
I have no distractions,
I am self-sustaining
and I live off and alongside nature
and every day I walk my island paradise
and I swim in the beautiful blue sea;
I read the books that I brought with me,
and I daily write down what I see –
what I think about and what I feel
about life in my journal and diary;
I listen to the sound of the waves
and each one is like the voice of an old friend
stopping by to say ‘hello’;
I hear the music of my youth
playing from out of nowhere;
and when I think about the outside world,
and about my friends and family living their lives
far away, their faces appear
as if sculpted by the billion of grains
of sand that I see below me.

My hair is long;
my beard is substantial;
my skin is brown;
my home is a hand-built house
of cut down trees that has a roof of green
and hard-wearing leaves;
from my favourite spot,
looking out at my favourite view,
I have seen unimaginable sights:
dolphins, turtles, whales;
just off the coast, below the waves,
there is the most stunning
and beautiful coral reef.

To me, this place is heaven;
to me, this life could not be anymore perfect;
to me there is nowhere else in the entire world
where you could see the sun rise and the sun set,
and lay down on your back and see
a 360-degree view of the Milky-way galaxy’s
infinite and magnificent stars
shining their incredible and magical light,
in a place that is in every way
the definition of idyllic.

In my daydream, I look to the oncoming waves
and I see something bobbing up and down
before being washed up on the beach in front of me
and within touching distance of the toes of my feet;
I am not phased by the sight of the plastic bottle
and the evident message on a piece of paper
that is contained within –
however, when I reach down for the bottle
and I unscrew the lid and I reach in
and pull out the piece of paper,
it takes me awhile to realize
the messages’ meaning
because of how profound
the four-words of it are,
it takes a while to sink in.

I am brought back to reality in a flash!
As I look at the world, and to the sea,
everything looks even more stunning
and beautiful than it had appeared before.
Still with the message from my daydream
echoing in my mind like a bell,
I decide to write the same message
in pen on a torn-out page
from my nearby journal…
I write the same message
in the same way as it had appeared to me
only seconds before in my imagination,
and then I put the message
in an empty bottle of water
that I had brought with me earlier,
I stand up,
I run towards the ocean
and I throw my message in a bottle out
as far as I can
for someone to find in the future,
for someone to discover and read;
and then I sit back down
and I watch the sea again,
and I am again taken away
to a far-away place –
all the while, I am sitting in the sun
on the sand of this gorgeous beach.

My Poem ‘The Book People’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Every book lover
has their favourite author;
every literary enthusiast
has their favourite book;
every storyteller,
every story reader,
knows that books
are really secret doors;
everyone with an imagination
can go on a journey
and cherish every word,
as if they had never read
a single sentence before.

I love hearing people say:
“oh my god, I love this book!” –
especially from the mouths of the young;
I always smile when I see
a fellow fan of an author
and a book that I love.
Stories have the power
to make you feel something amazing,
to greater depth and effect
sometimes than a song;
there are tales and characters
that shine for me and show me
the way to somewhere I have been looking for –
like the stars that shimmer like glitter
in the dark sky above.

A library is like a gold-mine of riches;
a bookstore is like a fountain of wishes;
a mind is a place where stories become a part of us;
a network of like-minded people is absolutely wondrous;
communication is the best way to feel free and boundless;
language is the supreme method
to teach someone about themselves;
sharing your dreams can inspire the dreams
and the imagination of countless generations;
the world that you live in with everyone else
is full of art that is truly timeless.

Books are meant to be opened and read,
and books are meant to share your life with you,
and they are meant to change as they live their own life –
being carried from place to place
and being held by person to person;
every book and every story, to me, is a limited edition;
any and every book has words and worlds within
that are uniquely special;
everybody has their own attractive qualities,
but to me their is no greater gift and attribute,
and no greater example of enlightened character,
than to be one of the millions of people,
of all ages all around the world,
who happily count themselves
as one of “The Book People”.

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My Poem ‘Burning Bright’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

‘Poet of the Sphere’,
‘The Sound of Mark’,
‘The Eternal Boy’ –
I am my books, and my books are me;
just as Ray Bradbury is ‘Fahrenheit 451’,
‘The Martian Chronicles’, ‘The Illustrated Man’ –
just as those books will forever be
Ray Bradbury.

An author has a connection to their books,
to their stories,
that is even beyond the words that they have written;
a published writer is a part
of each and every one of their books –
deeper than the cover, the ink, the paper, the ideas;
a storyteller knows what it is
to have true unburdened and unbounded imagination;
a wordsmith embodies their words and their works,
and their power cannot be taken away from them,
not even by fire.

To me, there is no greater sin in this life
than to burn a book, to try and destroy a story,
to undo what was done and written;
to me, there is no greater crime
than ignorance of the truth;
to me, everyone of Earth with a story to tell
deserves to speak aloud and stand under a hot sun;
to me, and to a lot of writers,
the knowledge of life that each and every one
of us possesses is what keeps us Human,
and it is what makes us unique –
magic is real,
and language and stories are the proof.

J.M. Barrie is Peter Pan;
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is Sherlock Holmes;
Terry Prachett is every character
that lives on the ‘Disk World’;
William Shakespeare is every character
that he wrote and gave life to in his plays;
Stephen King is Roland Deschain
from his epic ‘Dark Tower’ series of books;
Neil Gaiman is ‘Shadow’ from ‘American Gods’;
Douglas Adams is Arthur Dent;
J.K. Rowling is Harry Potter;
J.R.R. Tolkien is Bilbo Baggins;
and I am every one of my poems,
that to me are like rhyming short-stories.

Every writer of every book,
is each and every one of the characters that they write;
every myth, tale, and story, is an inspiring light;
every author deserves to have their books
remembered and embodied until the end of time –
from the sunrise of every morning,
until the moon fades away again
at the end of another night;
every story can live forever and be retold,
if people take them into their minds
and into their hearts,
and allow them to never stop
burning bright.

In memory of Ray Bradbury;
and all authors, all books;
and all myths, tales,
characters, and stories.

My Poem ‘Reading is Believing’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Libraries are closing everywhere I look;
the doors of places of knowledge and wonder
are being closed shut, like the covers of there books;
our breathtaking banks of inspiration are no longer protected;
I one day fear that children will miss out
on a magical and life-empowering experience,
should our libraries evaporate into a cloud of numbers and frequencies,
and as a result the future of the world will be affected.

Every day I hear about another library
under threat from being turned into a “used to be”;
every day I see people reading and entranced in a story;
every day I see people in bookstores being drawn to books
by their title and the incredible art of their covers;
every day adults and children fall in love with books
and characters for the first time –
thanks to teachers, friends, family members, fathers, and mothers.

Every second a new writer, a brand new story-teller, is born,
and continues the story of humanity;
every baby who is brought up to loving parents,
in an incredible family, is introduced to reading,
and sharing ideas, from almost the day
that they get to sleep in their own bed;
every experience has its own voice,
and some have even been reinterpreted in the form of a novel,
and then adapted into a movie.

There is no more sad or depressing story, to me,
than that of a nearby town thinking about closing a library;
I never want to see a day when the only way that words can be read
is strictly and exclusively electronically –
digital books are great, but they will never have the life-span,
or the story and journey, of a physical book,
and that is the way it will always be.

Libraries are islands of tranquility;
books are the legacy of hope, history, tragedy,
that also still carry the story and the DNA of its parent tree;
reading a book is a personal passion for some people,
and to me there is no better place to see the belief
that reading is believing than in paper books,
that are like reading every person who has ever lived’s diary;
and that is why I believe it is everyone’s duty and responsibility
to do all they can to save the libraries.

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My Poem ‘Book Bag’

Mark Hastings Poetry , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I am a writer.
I have always been the one to be seen
with his notebook open
and his pen ready to write in his hand.
I am a reader.
I have always been known to carry around with me
everything I could possibly need,
while I am walking and rediscovering the world,
in my constantly changing holdall and bag.

Wherever I go,
the bag that I have hanging from my shoulder
always has a book or two inside –
I carry around both of my own poetry books,
but I also always have the book that I am currently reading
at the moment with me too,
in case I accidentally, or intentionally,
find myself on a deserted island somewhere,
and I need a good story and compelling characters
in order to get by with and pass the time.

Just recently, right now, and usually,
my “book bag” has inside it:
my poetry notebook,
my books ‘Poet of the Sphere’ and ‘The Sound of Mark,
‘The Drawing of the Three’ by Stephen King,
and Ray Bradbury’s amazing ‘Fahrenheit 451’;
I just love the thought that I always have a place
and a world to go to, within my myself,
or within and under the covers of an incredible book.

I am never too far away from books and stories of every kind,
of varying depths of complexity, passion, language, and adventure;
I always have in my mind, if not in my hand,
tales of people and characters who live and breath
in real and fictional worlds in the past, in another life,
in the optimistic reality of an imagined future.

There are people who don’t read books,
who never even think about what they could possibly find
hidden and waiting for them
within the chapters and story of a classic;
there are some people who use exclamations to describe things,
but who have never felt the thrill of reading a true epic.

There are people who love to read and love stories,
and who read many things, in many ways,
and in this day and age they can do so electronically, anywhere:
books filled with romance, thrills, horror, life, mystery;
I, myself, am a purist –
someone who believes that the experience of holding a book in your hand,
feeling the weight of it, and flicking through the pages,
is part of reading a story that every reader should have;
and even though, in my opinion, I think that anywhere
and in any way creativity can be shared is the best thing ever,
and I am not against sharing art by any means,
I would always choose to have a story read
and ingrained in the paper pages of a soft-cover or a hard-back book –
and that is why I will continue to carry stories of my own,
and of other writers around with me, in my “book bag”.