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David Grubb
Mr and Mrs B Entering Heaven
All the way from Derbyshire with their six grandfather clocks
all telling a different time and all transformed now because
there was no time to tell;
and there was no need for spectacles or hot water bottles or books
and the big bed that was somehow more like a ship of whispers
and things still unsaid;
and whatever would the radio be saying without them as they
gradually moved forward looking for people
they might have known?
Quiet as quilt,
as pillow;
as slippers,
as unmade.
Ian McEwen
T’ai Chi in Buena Vista Park
Hard to be sure they aren’t mental
or radio-controlled.
They stroke invisible objects
like desire or fear
or beauty
folded in slow motion around
a white geometry
of curves and flutes.
It’s a kind of dance I suppose
and like whale song might make sense
accelerated to the twitter of birds:
the sparrows that seem to live
on a different time. But there’s no music
unless they hear it in their heads
or think they’re making it.
A long ambient sound
that maybe tunes in at night
like very stretched out foreign radio.
Now they are in my head too.
The vegetable stall man’s flat
hand which says ‘this much’,
the taxi drivers’ arabesque
frustrations, all the confetti
gestures of the street
describe the shell of something missing
or batter at blurred megahertz
like the caged hummingbird I saw
once, down in China Town.
Iggy McGovern
The Irish Poem Is
a Táin Bó, a Spring Show, a video
a trodden dream, a parish team, a tax-break scheme
a prison cell, an Angelus bell, a clientele
a brinded cow, a marriage vow, a domestic row
a tattered coat, a puck goat, a telly remote
a game of tig, a slip jig, a U2 gig
a restored tower, a Holy Hour, a pressure shower
a ticking clock, a summer frock, a shock-jock
a hazel wand, a dipping pond, a page 3 blonde
a canal bank, a returned Yank, a septic tank
a green flag, a Child of Prague, a Prada bag
a whispering sea, a Rose of Tralee, a transfer fee
a disused shed, a settle bed, a Club Med
a long strand, a ceili band, a one night stand
a ‘barbaric yawp’, a sweet shop, an alcopop
a flax dam, a high pram, an email spam
a new estate, a blind date, a security gate
a pint of plain, a lover’s lane, a place in Spain
a cold eye, a bittern cry, a heroin high
a Raglan Road, a tractor load, a Da Vinci code
a lake isle, a wooden stile, a paedophile
a night feed, a Rosary bead, a corporate greed
a lonely impulse, a bag of dulse, a fading pulse
a herring shoal, a fox stole, a death toll
a Pangur Bán, a paraffin can, a fake tan
a fire-king, a fairy ring, a bling-bling
a tickled trout, a boy scout, a ticket tout
a wild swan, a frogspawn, a roll out lawn
a lost tribe, a D’Olier Street scribe, a planning bribe
a huge rose, a garden of repose, a wine nose
a whirlpool, a milking stool, a drug mule
a stony grey soil, a three-in-one oil, a Mrs Doyle
a planter’s daughter, a school jotter, a mineral water
a potato pit, a banana-split, a gangland hit
a deep heart’s core, a Georgian door, a quick score
a white muslin dress, an Evening Press, an email address
a newborn lamb, a radiogram, an internet scam
a village master, a sticking plaster, a ghetto blaster
a third light, a second sight, a bungalow blight
a solitary enzyme, a closing time, an end rhyme.
Hugh O'Donnell
End House, Gordon's Bay
Washed out my body lies in weed and grass
in all the places where we once did pass.
Ingrid Jonker, Escape
1. Morning and evening we unlock then lock
the length of chain across the driveway -
not that we’ve seen anything suspicious.
2. The juice from the crushed berries by the gate
sticks to our shoes and makes a mess inside.
Avoid them. It’s not our house.
3. At night the sea insists on a big presence
and covers us with the sweepings of the floor.
So far down, we dream and dream.
4. That red stain across the water you noticed
on the way to Hermanus is not shark food.
I’ve made enquiries. It has a name.
5. Evenings, taking the path through gnarled trees
to the restaurant, listen - a man persuading a woman,
laughter round a fire, wave-fall, backwash.
6. This close to the edge
we feel inclined to put down the book and undress;
to swim out with no thought of return.
Orlagh O’Farrell
Skylight
A rickety table with three mismatched chairs,
I’m on the flimsy one, a cushion over its
sagging wicker seat.
Afternoon strikes the marmalade
and makes it glow.
You’re turning Tarot cards
beside a pot of half-cold tea, its
brown lid rattles when I pour.
A dusty spider plant
sends aimless offshoots baling to the floor.
The traffic hums around
the Green, the heroes’ gate.
We’ve endless tea, and Pink Floyd on the stereo
and seagull sounds
we’re high up here, amongst the roofs.
I wonder if
we should go back to bed
your room that’s strewn
with the mattress on the floor, my clothes, my hasty bag
but others come and you
throw down the key wrapped in a sock.
I want to show you
a bird’s nest you say, when we’re all
sitting round and drinking tea, and you
take my hand and pull me to the room.
I laugh.
I love your country ways.
I’m failing my exams.
William Palmer
The Death of Likeness
Wood pigeons feed on the rowan tree;
fly suddenly away
- the thin branches upswaying -
return a moment later, gorge,
the branches bearing down.
They are birds. That is a tree.
Over a mound of earth
a blue plastic sheet is spread,
weighted across its middle
by a plank, one darker knot
in its length, two nails at one end.
The plank is not a path, a ship, a brown, shaped land.
The sheet is not a sea,
seized and rippled by the eye.
The blue sheet flaps its edges in the wind.
The pegs on the nylon line
Are nothing but white wood and spring.
Her picture and this empty ring;
each movement of branch or sheet,
say only - that nothing is
‘as if’ or ‘like’ or ‘seems’.
That nothing is to be, from now,
like anything else at all.
Jane Routh
Field notes
We had talked the evening into bat-light
when he gestured with his eyes Turn; look.
A tawny – flat face against the glass, balanced
on the sill, wings (arms, I almost said) outspread.
Maybe it was a far glow from the kitchen
across indoor plants and wooden stairs drew the owl
as to a roost. An armslength from where we sat.
It is not true they only hunt at night.
The year they were calling from each end of the garden
I saw one slide from view behind the hedge
at noon. And once, blackbird commotions
made me run into the Little Wood: two paces in
an owl dropped the henbird at my feet.
Alive but too ripped and bloodied to save.
The owl kept up its slow beat at the pane.
We continued our talk in quiet tones
and I thought that if I had been the friend
sitting by me, I would have been stricken:
the light gone, the great bird glaring down,
him saying I’ve caused that much pain
and not knowing how to stop.
K.V. Skene
Flying Without You
Point of Departure Heathrow, Charles de Gaulle, Cincinnati &
Northern Kentucky and it’s a long, long way
without
love – a word I can’t live with
although I keep trying to. Touch me,
I bend. Kiss me, I open.
Want me,
I am warm air rising…
Gate 13
Even the clock disconnects
as minute by minute 747s
drop out of heaven,
howling,
as I wait (without you) to begin/
to be gone. The older I get
the more certain uncertainty is.
Take-off
And the earth turns around
its petrified past. I slip a ring
from my finger and take myself
(separately, deliberately)
into tomorrow – a detour, a début,
a divorce. Flying without you
is being unknown, uncared-for,
in an undiscovered country.
Suspended in Sky Blue. The icecold blue
in which time disintegrates
and thoughts crystal upon conception.
The absolute bluenothingness that is tundra,
permafrost, glaciers smothered in wind,
slippery with snow-melt. The blueprint of a soul/
of a sea
in which wave after wave lifts, turns back
without looking.
Orbital Observation Underneath our wings
a suicide sky. Inside my brain
there is no difference between falling
into everything and falling
into nothing
both leave you without a choice/
a prayer.
Re-entry
Without fanfare the earth
rises,
the landscape expands
a little too fast: snowtrails, evergreen valleys,
skyhigh rivers slithering to sea
as small walleyed buildings shoulder
a switchblade highway, swell
to cityscape.
Touchdown
Flat earth and heavy bodyparts (Without you
I’m always filling in the blanks with truths
that aren’t.)
and time restarts, slow-rolls the concrete runway,
as I lug my overweight carry-on,
my overwrought memories
out the designated door.
Grounded
Leaving Lester B. Pearson,
streetlights blink a downtown
tattooed in red and gold.
I know what I’m hoping for,
holding
my breath for –
arriving (without you) at half-past
Happy Hour –
and I’ll knock on that blue
door on Bathurst Street
if without me
is the lonely place you want to be.
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