Poetry F
Colleen M. Farrelly
Family Portrait
Suit pressed,
hair slicked back,
Windsor knotted,
hands hidden
in deep pockets,
he smiles and poses
as she rests
a diamond-studded hand
on his shoulder,
her Oscar de la Renta floral
rustling in autumn’s breeze
as she gathers
their three children–
two boys and a girl–
to their side
before Joey’s romp
through the roses
dirties his pressed suit
or Ava’s headband
finds the koi pond.
“On three,
say cheese!
One, two, three!”
Click. Click. Click.
Like the Pyrrhic Victory
or the Potemkin Village:
the Family Portrait.
*
fat drops prattle on
the roof antagonizing
and punching my backyard ferns
powerless to fight
back like U.N. peacekeepers
standing watch in Kigali
*
April’s gentle breeze
coaxes young bromeliads
to show their reds and purples
from a winter’s sleep
I drink in the scent of life
restoration after war
Sleeping
A blanked pulled tight over rags
half-hides
the figure curled up,
asleep on subway seats.
Beetle Bailey’s War
When “A” Company went to Peshawar,
Ole Beetle caught a bullet in the butt,
and they sent him home to dear Miss Buxley.
Cosmo went to three packs a day—nerves shot
after tour number four—cursing the day
that “A” Company went to Peshawar.
Sarge took shrapnel in the shins near Khyber
Pass, finished out at Walter Reed,
and they sent him home to dear Miss Buxley.
Killer’s wife couldn’t ease his pain, but his
Colt erased the scenes his mind replayed from
when “A” Company went to Peshawar.
When the mess took indirect fire, grenades
peppered poor Cookie’s last spaghetti pot,
and they sent him home to dear Miss Buxley.
Years later, General Fuzz pauses, then
speaks on the crisis in Chad, recalling
when “A” Company went to Peshawar,
and how war sent them home to Miss Buxley.
Portrait of Hope
Ugly spray-painted slogans scar the boarded-up building, pock-marks left by the disease of hate. The doctor opens his black bag and rummages for his tools: stencils, cans, and sketches. He preps his supplies under streetlight and performs plastic surgery on his patient‘s imperfections, precisely excising tissues marred by bullets and lovingly covering the salvaged surface with a portrait of hope.
Teachings of a Street Prophet
Inarticulate teachings of a street prophet
ramble from his cracked, blistering lips; how can he
teach of the intricate, intimate, infinite?
I promise myself it will only take a minute
to hear his incoherent arguments, sure to be
inarticulate teachings of a street prophet.
I pause and take his pamphlet out of etiquette,
cringing inside. How can one without a degree
teach of the intricate, intimate, infinite?
Dirty, crazy, God’s self-appointed advocate,
he reeks of alcohol. His slurred words are only
inarticulate teachings of a street prophet.
At my lab, I toss his pamphlet in my wastebasket.
Reason drives science, science reason. How dare he
teach of the intricate, intimate, infinite!
But then I realize this unshorn, raving prophet
is a person—valued, loved—and I begin to see:
inarticulate teachings of a street prophet
teach of the Intricate, Intimate, Infinite.
Junkie Love
Romeo and Juliet huddle close
to the cooker near boarded up windows.
Rail thin, shivering, sweating, shaking, she
fumbled her belt and pleads, “Me next, baby.
Please? You know how I get when I miss my dose.”
Juliet rolls up her sleeves to expose
a good vein. Her age and naiveté shows;
she can’t do it herself, so they must be
Romeo and Juliet.
Warmth envelops her as heroin flows
through bruised, scarred veins, and her restless mind slows
as she nods off. Romeo lovingly
covers her with the tattered blanket he
found outside, hoping she never outgrows
Romeo and Juliet.
A Place Called Afghanistan
I sit in class and stare at the red nine of ten
atop my week’s chosen spelling test. We taught
our teacher where this place is: Afghanistan.
Fourteen years later, hear the rat-a-tat-tat,
feel the dust mix with sweat in the sweltering heat
and toss the backpack into the tattered tent.
It’s a world away, forever etched in our hearts—
names, dates long forgotten by most of the world
outside these mountain trenches—we few it haunts,
who’ve seen the children laughing, shouting strange words
in Pashto as we pass treacherous terrain.
At home, symbols of our country’s best or worst
decisions; here, we grieve, never forgetting
those we’ve lost in the Valley in the ‘Stan.
Neil Fawcett
The Immortal Mosquito
When dust first rose to blind the fallow mass,
and Judas followed Jesus, I was there.
They crowned his head with thorns on bloodied hair
and dragged him through the streets beneath a cross.
I tried the blood that bloomed upon his face
and drank a glob of Jesus in despair,
but nothing in its essence could compare
to Judas blood so strong with thick distaste.
Since that time I feast Iscariot lines
their blood bulbs grapes that burst on stony ground
too full of juice to hang upon the vines.
It grows in yards with wire and barbs around
yet through the years they’ve fed me very well.
I dine on wine matured by infidels
Patronage
A man parked his car
at Lidl on the Aeropli road
and filled it with food and wine.
Watched,
by a thin man
from Pakistan
with a spray bottle
and a dirty cloth.
Uninvited,
he sprayed the screen,
scratched off dried bugs,
scrubbed it clean.
Grateful, ( for the opportunity)
the blood faced man
rummaged for a euro,
shook the cleaner’s hand,
smiled and drove off
to his villa in the hills.
Glasgow Girl
Do you know what she said,
that blond young girl from Glasgow?
The moneyless, motherless girl
sitting on the edge of her bed,
looking down to the million-souled city,
belly slopping with cheap soup;
The girl with hungry worry gnawing
the bone at the back of her brain
with ninety eight pence and some
soup to see her through until Friday –
This blond young girl child from Glasgow said:
‘I don’t think about the future
that’s ages away isn’t it?
I worry about money, but everyone worries.
Those with money worry,
just not about money.’
French Fields
Home keys not pressed
rest.
Crosses trace the contours
white.
A chorus of silenced
chords
string across the wind.
Michael Fenton
GUERNICA circa 21st Century
Feet walk on jutted pavements
heads filled with lasting scars
collateral destruction by the carnage displayed
Battle zones marched by foreign boots
fire on a blink – friend or foe
the ‘gods’ claim absolution
Wall graffiti in blood
acerbity of putrefied flesh
vultures hunched in satiety
Frozen frames recorded in archives
mortuary remains after autopsies
probed for reasons of concealment
The innocent stand in rows
by empty graves ready to seed
a harvest of scythed cadavers
Hyenas, moon circled, bay their dismay
their excrement valued by gold worship
the earth trod in quicksand oblivion
Shards of stained glass windows pierce beliefs
deities showed no concern
the cleavage of self regard exposed
Jim Ferguson
fifty-one
for Marion & Eve
now that we are fifty-one
many things done and others not
still we don’t want to be caught
on our deathbeds with regrets
how we recall our smoking teachers
belting us for doing the same
and it was meant to be better if we were talking
the Inglish of the Queen
rather than our West of Scotland ‘slang’
which wasn’t allowed in the classroom then
unless of course it was Rabbie Burns
his auld language was fit to be taught
but the language of our parents
of our homes and of our streets
most definitely was not deemed fit
for the expression of finer thoughts
now that we are fifty-one
we’re free almost from that
at least
wir almost free frae that
Chris Firth
Evening Song
The sky is lamp blue,
The horizon black kohl
On the eyelid
Of evening.
The moon is a drum,
The single star smiles,
So high, so bright, so pure,
Alone.
Town lights flicker on
Below this hill top,
Thoughts drift through
Long shadows of curving streets.
Slowly
The moon will rise,
Slowly
All stars blossom,
Slowly
The night wheels in.
Join in, join in –
Inevitably
The whole world
Is in the song.
Thank you, thank you.
Slowly now –
This whole world
Turns into song.
Flight
In sleep
I became a bird of clay;
I was yearning
For the sweet breath of dawn.
That was me
Singing like an upstart jay
Alone out there
In the apple tree.
My life
Had been lived inside a glass jar
Until you came
Throwing me from a distance.
There was no sky
For me to fly in
Until you came,
Guiding from the certainty
Of the bright star.
Slowly
You hooked me
And bound me;
You lured me on strings
To the temple door.
Slowly
You hooked me
And led me
Through doorways
Filled with blue shadow.
‘Let go of everything,’ you sang,
Or maybe, ‘Hold on to nothing.’
It is never easy to translate
The precise wording of dreams.
‘Let go of everything,’ you sang
‘Hold onto nothing.
Let it all go.
Let everything go.
The Winding Way
When I searched for you
All I found was shadow
Shifting around my feet;
You were not even gossamer
When I needed concrete.
When I rushed to you
You moved further away
As if playing a game;
You stood in the distance
Teasing out my name.
I took the winding path
Through scrubland wilderness
And you were always elsewhere
High up in the mountains
Or down in the city square.
When I hid from myself
I found you’d made a home
In the bolt-hole of my heart;
You’d led me on the winding way
Right here to the start.
There is no point in running now
You are always too fast,
Just ahead of the wind.
There is no point in running now
We always arrive
Just when we would have
Anyhow.
Night Page
A comma of moon,
And all the stars are words
Named in a night book.
There you stand, far off,
Aloof
Like an estranged friend.
I don’t even search for your face
In all this anymore
It’s hard to believe a God.
When parents betray us
And leave us frozen young
It’s hard to believe a God.
In strong families
Faith takes root deepest;
The tallest trees
Grow best in forests.
For us
It’s as though the map is there
But not the country.
The night book is open
But all the words have slipped away as stars.
A gentle rain falls
But there are no ripples upon the lake.
The Tower
Even when I had pure love
I yearned for purer;
I could not drink
Enough of wine.
Like a thirsty fool on his raft
On a flooded river
I dipped my cup in too deep,
And so it ran over.
Like a frantic new city
I built my towers higher
And higher,
Believing that I could crowd
Everything right inside me.
Not even daylight
Could reach my teeming streets.
When the stars were out
I worshiped the sun;
When the sun was up
I crowed for the moon;
When she came
I saw that her face was all glamour,
A mesmeric mirror,
A cold stone clock.
Not good enough!
Not good enough!
For years I twittered on,
Missing your gift
As the birds all around me
Sang simply
Of dawn.
R.G. Foster
Uneasy Quartet
Spying commerce
On a shady veranda,
The blue mink sprung
At naked knees
Well-torn, ‘mid garland swirls
of pinks, and such.
Davis, stood at the crag-top, observes
the ranks a-dangle, bone-built mutations
fat-draped, decided.
Abstracts o’ the scientists
Spin on upward,
Rhetoric in darkness,
Science & Politics:
Advancing Fantasies.
The princess, once,
Begun to think –
‘Would not
A melody brighten the house?’
But employment, alas,
was not her arena.
1959+
Titled it ‘Blue’
but it was green, GREEN
(as ole’ H.C…)
drought land, dumb stream, cassia,
a notable hole in advertising
‘Lips
Bring in
The smoke, burns in
Cells
‘til
Exhalation’
“Modern” discolouring
of an ecstasy.
ministers praise the imports,
Leisure sees itself retained
before the widening house-fronts.
Post-Flood
1.
Neons welter, –
dim sparks writhing,
the river lies, without motion,
along its banks the white horses are tied
by beaten ropes, and the streets are packed
with a cadaverous congregation.
A cat staggers
by the cyclamen, dazed and drunken,
the shards of its teeth glisten
in the yellow moonlight.
2.
The prophet is dead.
The kings emerge onto a balcony,
the mist-cords begin to stretch, unchallenged,
chariots creep from the vaults, bearing flags and banners,
damp violas cast rickety tunes, and the vair canopy, –
it reaches, embroidered with dragons and cuckoos.
3.
The bright rags of a virgin
climb from a manhole, – the horses, awoken
with memories of destriers, break
from the riverbank. And she, she
smiles at a slumbering cat, and does not acknowledge
any reason to wake it.
Besiegement
Fog rises
to the balcony
of the watchtower,
beyond the city walls
vermilion spirits
dance on the plateau,
below, men
stagger from bordellos,
children shiver and stare
at the gallows, and here,
on the balcony,
he smiles,
carving a fresh language
into the railing,
for his smile is consumed by the fog.
Exultation
The morning rains
past the garret window.
On the bed, a mass
of fat and silk sprawls
on the blonde.
Far off, against the hillside, the heat
gathers and swirls on the floor
of the amphitheatre. And in the parados, the procession of gold
armour barks anthems of victory, marching with flags
and banners, – vair, bronze, tigerskin, – projecting the gold
face of the trophy. Ragged children
crowd the theatron, crushing the foreign grapes
underfoot, singing and shoving while they chew the meat.
On the orchestra Paris stands,
riven and bleeding, his head upturned, his chin erect, –
she leans against the window.
Wrapped in a frayed gown,
she shivers, behind her,
the commander smirks,
humming his distant tunes,
watching the harlot’s hair fade further.
The Cake
my teeth snapped –
the chime of failure
& frosted steel
rang throughout
the hall.
all those brains,
personality,
ambition –
all lay broken
on the whalebone
desk. seduced
by gleaming
mouths, the smile
of this horde, oh yes,
it was healthy
stuff, i could see that.
then the leers,
the laughter,
rebounding
off the ceiling –
‘he’s useless!’
and down the
bloodless
desperate throats
swept the
shards of promise.
James Fountain
Work Horses
Sparrows cant, chirrup along the rooftops,
the morning moans, jolted back from night,
forcibly the world’s machine moves,
cogs climb into cars, engines groan into action,
as regimented life kickstarts itself,
wheels ignited, pistons firing, all in unison.
In the commotion, tempers flare, housed in unstable
fortresses, where cars career toward their goals
hap-hazardly, as humans hurtle to work,
aiming to avoid lateness, the angry manager,
the morose head of department, afeared
of losing their treasured occupations and incomes.
And happily installed in their batteries finally,
coffee is consumed rapidly to cement wakefulness,
though the irony is that the brown hot liquid
irritates the nerves and causes more tension,
office terrorism and email wars, hatred
for life itself, for the source of this creation.
Trio
As the rain cascades, skidding through
making the sky molten, a seething grey,
the mind awash with thoughts, flooded
in the midst of futurity, three figures
tramp the city streets.
The day’s work done, cars glide boat-like
along the rain-soaked road, the fizz of tyres
sounds as the work-stained faces of the masses
pass hurriedly along Oxford Street, umbrellas
like crosiers, leading them forward,
bags strapped over shoulders.
The trio’s path leads them through London,
from one rain-soaked alleyway to the next
in search of shelter as the pavement glitters
tantalisingly, like diamonds, fool’s gold,
shaking off the gnawing tiredness accumulated.
An hour later, in a shelter, a polystyrene cup of minestrone,
some bread, the stars twinkling overhead,
these three drowse wearily, conversation kept
to a minimum, the moon lurks like a giant eye,
the clouds dispersed, though the damp remains.
Al Khobar at Night
Mechanical monsters hog the roads,
untamed and mismanaged, amid unfinished
buildings and desert expanses, in fifty
degree heat, among the natural desert lines
and undulations, a new empire is building.
In imitation of the west, these lines of men and women
stand ready with trucks and construction materials,
steel and glass structures, cables and pylons,
as the oil industry’s centre this nation senses
potential, an attitude in response to disapproval,
an uprising against discontent at this notion
that Saudi is desert, and thus uninhabitable
man’s mission to overcome the impossible vividly evident.
In the warm hair-dryer breeze of evening
I secretly steal internet outside my bosses’ apartment,
Islamic prayers are on loudspeaker from the cenotaph,
fill the dark dusty air reverberating with the ‘God’s will’ prophecy,
as the streetlights of the desert
reveal its motionlessness, and in the eerie silence
which follows, the city seems preoccupied
by it’s own spirituality, lost in the sense of self
and place in this universe, the unifying
force of religion binding its occupants in.
In the tranquil zone of night, I tread to bed
aware of the silence and stillness of desert
windless and motionless, the sense of emptiness,
a space for the soul, as ambition itself
quietly begins to stir.
excerpts from Glaciation: a poem sequence
I
The clouds of this starless night cloak thought,
Obscure the tread of tireless pacing among dreams,
In the sun of meagre spacing, of buildings
Traced against the skyline, the mind reaches
A momentary peace, a fossilization of emotion,
While you in the far flung twinkling of Sirius appear.
To the shoreline racing seagulls, you motor through
This night, a tide of trembling feeling envelops
The senses, a glacial erosion creates a carving
In your country, hollows out a space where I once was,
Bringing a freedom, a lowland exposure yearned for,
And the stratosphere crouches, waiting to be filled.
II
The green lean pastures blades flow clean
In the wind, die smooth in the glow
Of light propelled, motored from within
As dimly the crashing sea reaches ears
Attuned to circumspect observation, elastic
In tones unloaded, the sky answers me,
Folds dull curling petals around the light,
Closes in, the dappled stream swings across,
And dim the sky answers, whispers amen.
Lean the sea projects her kisses, softly
Against the land’s lips, wet and wanton,
Relentless, the surf licks and steadily devours.
Soon the lunar cycle will push those kisses away,
And chance could bring you back for more, one day.
In gaze of stern, yet supple rock-clusters, the waves
Rock and intend harm, the alarms of yesterday
Smashed with scorn, blown out from within
The link pitched and secured, as steady hands
Bind in significance, fending off the weight,
As the tide turns to frustrate
Those who are less fortunate.
III: The Cliff Face
Here, the rock moves imperceptibly,
smooth through the rough ground
of peat and shale and fossils composed.
Wildly hang the crags at the summit,
cracked with age, from the weather wearing down,
a curlew cruising high overhead, wailing
for the coming of another storm,
the second in as many days, and mid-cliff-face,
three hundred feet up, four hundred from the summit
I try not to panic. I am young but have weathered
many a storm, the elements shall not have their way
nor do the strains of aching joints concern me greatly.
It can be done. I will wait for you, should I survive,
at the precipice, carve your image as I make each
movement, and hope that the trust I placed in you
was one of my wiser moves.
VI: The Surface
Here, the terrain is folded glass grass,
opaque in the open meadow sunshine blast,
as mellow in the open grassland beyond,
and high the cloud-clusters, opal-firing dragonfly
pollinated stemens, loose the cannon and send
their intended cargo into air, as bullfinch
stands and delivers his song, the sparrow hawk
soars overhead, talons ready, whilst
the juicy glow-worm squirms in the reeds,
the hawk knows the trick, knows the bullfinch,
senses his moment, plucks the air,
takes his share, to divide among young.
And mother sun looms on the horizon,
the surface broken, the mountain cragged,
the sea an open wound, gashed into the world,
magma beneath, the cliff-face above,
obstacles for the human heart, buried beneath,
and low swings the empty hand,
yearning for nothingness.
VII: The Water-Level
Now the ground-water has reached its zenith,
and the oppressive seeds have been dispersed, far
from their place of birth, migrant seeds to migrant lands
splayed from their intended path, yet settle and manage
as they can.
The water-level consumes houses,
which become boats, treading in shallow waters,
attempting to support life, to be of some solid use,
silently life adapts, bolts itself magnetically,
so that nothing changes, everything moored
and secured.
Soon, I will leave here, and seek
out the sea. The inland waterways are not for me,
never were. But here, inland, did I seek you.
Or rather, I imagined you seeking yourself.
In many ways I thought I was there,
but that was earlier,
in my youth.
VIII: The Sea Bed
Here in the blue-green depths
lie layers of settling sediment,
skewed by the time beyond time,
before the first man, before orchids named,
as life shows itself through scales,
gills contracting, fins waving,
clockwork eyes unmoved,
sharpened by the dim light,
as atoms secure beneath
allow the life above to breathe
in liquid encasement,
drowned in darkness in the deep,
captured in nothingness.
Pragmatic fish slither their way forward,
the hull of a ship passing high overhead,
its engine emitting sound-waves, bubbles of oxygen.
Its lights illuminate the top layer,
a school of yellow mantra following its headmistress
whilst other pupils mutter among themselves,
as the sky closed above jostles to be seen.
Asking the Right Questions
‘What was that?’ he asked
just then, a slice through silence,
cruising through serenity,
a bomb in my world.
Why was it asked?
You may well enquire,
designed to track progress?
To answer our prayers?
Silence was broken
for a reason, fell down
like a curtain shrouding
truth, folding lives of men.
Naomi Foyle
Ancient History
Assyrian warriors planned invasions twice: once sober
and once drunk. Swimming the Tigris hugging goats’ bladders
they prayed for giant angels to guide them after death
through iron gates now standing in a museum corridor.
Desert wolves, they ruled their age, with savage pride creating
Babylon and cuneiform tableaux ― the virtues of their king
crosshatched across his portrait, as if an army of small birds
had marched a hymn of praise upon his stage.
The Assyrians were also early body sculpture artisans,
from cypress sap and camel tongues engineered machines
to build their calves into the shape of conch shells,
the trumpets of their Gods …or so I whisper in your ear…
as in this hall of infidels, I pause, trying not to hold you —
who once harnessed every natural force to come down on my fold.
Snapshuts
So much is lost forever
unless we blu tack postcards
to the wall.
English Eccentrics In Love
Not just his tiger rugs and scorpions,
all of Stanley Spencer’s paintings make me think of you:
their rich palette like the quarried colours
of your kisses; their untamed quaintness
like the way you sometimes brush your hair.
And the artist, I am sure, would approve of your desire
to start a new religion, just to worship women.
When the virgin Stanley married, he painted the Resurrection
in his village churchyard: souls arising from the soil
in tribute to the earthly succour of his wife.
After divorcing Hilda, though, he fell
hard for a dyke, painted Patricia naked
beside a leg of mutton, his own ineffectual
appendages — glasses, genitals, head — dangling
blue and strangled over her supine disdain.
I’m sure you would have warned him, man to man,
but when he offered his model all his money and his house
Patricia and her lover had a little chat,
agreed that she would walk the aisle with him ―
Stanley slept once more with Hilda on the wedding night.
Patricia scarpered six months later
(back to Dorothy’s warm bed),
unperturbed by carnal knowledge of our Stan.
Spencer, undaunted by the weakness of the flesh,
wrote love letters to his Hilda for years beyond her death.
Who’d choose to be a painter or a muse? God knows
I smiled when you announced your chosen deity. But
though gold rings have never come between us at the altar
we anoint; though women also are to me the staff of life;
still I suffer like a wife the fluctuations of your faith.
Leaves tremble, water shimmers when we touch,
swans sail down our river in the night.
But the red brick walls of factories and chimney stacks
bulge between us in the moonlight
when you rise to go back home before the dawn.
Perhaps I do deserve someone unswerving, who’ll build me up
with patient brushstrokes in his heart. But if you did
would I adopt Patricia’s joyless gaze:
irritated icon, shark in lace garters,
martyr to the marriage bed, a girls’ girl to the end?
Grey Sunshine
after b/w by Niall McDevitt (22.02.1967 – 29.09.2022)
October and I stop
on the verge of this world
acknowledge two small beacons
of eldritch electricity —
a pair of poet ghosts
lit by fungal filaments
drizzling onyx sigils
in the incandescent grass
*
you were born in Limerick I the same night in Islington
we met on our 39th birthday in a clapped-out white BMW —
I in the back with my Belsize Park beau Diana driving
up to a cold curb where you quaffed and quiffed
guitar case buttressing a lamp post Blake’s prints under your arm
squeezed in beside me and we were off
a night-scented bouquet of bohos and bon mots floating
through London to someone’s drunken boat on the Thames
where at a party being thrown for neither of us
we learned we both wrote poetry both
had backpacked round Europe with a tattered Rimbaud
when you strapped on your guitar sang Blake’s Songs
I fell silent
. . . don’t remember which ones . . .
no one had a phone
no one ever recorded those Songs
no one can delete
my first memory of your face ‒
haloed in the sulfur of Soho
and a faint cloud
of your February
breath
*
oh those Facebook photos of your last weeks
bedding down now in my mind —
your stoic flair a salt and dandelion poultice
I press against the axe wound
to my root
*
You nearly always had a girlfriend; I, a boyf ‒
except for that night you stayed at mine in Brighton after a gig.
I rolled out the futon, fetched the spare duvet, plumped your pillow
and, when you admired my undoubtedly-not-amber cat, told you the story
of my abortive trip from Cairo to the Temple of Bastet ‒ defeated
by a carriage full of smokers, only to be accosted by a man on the platform:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH EGYPTIAN TRAINS??
I towered over you, fists on hips.
You laughed. I went to bed.
Our spell unbroken.
That photo of us at the launch of b/w ‒
skulls touching, faces blissful
time twins joined at the head
*
Your death
singed the days
blanched the nights
snapped the spine
of twinship
drained my mirror
of movement
turned my trust
in cosmic order
into a negative
of faith
you
shocked silver hair
blackened grin
bleached soot-stripe suit
receding
as I
white-lipped
grey-skinned
black-eyed
flow on
*
an asymmetric 55 —
where once you walked
unseen, opposite,
in step
now a whistling wind
cold shoulders
my vision of the universe
into reverse
the past more alive
than the present
the future a tightening
trap
*
I write eco-science fiction.
But did not foresee your death.
I don’t recall snakes ever licking
my ears. And if they licked yours,
you never said.
We both studied Thoth.
Though when I gave you a Tarot reading
I unaccountably trembled
and the cards made no sense.
*
to keep my balance
I grasp
at black and white omens
serendipities
mystic correspondences . . .
Hey, little sister in the pub before the funeral
a polka dot scarf draped over the Metro box
at Victoria Station
a Tyger Angel Wing hoodie
on the train to work
I do realise that sightings
of black and white trainers
bearing our shared initial
are purely coincidental ‒
but still they burn
lightning bolts
in my eyes
*
To die at 55, in your prime.
To spend a tenth of your life dying.
To be tithed to death.
To not tell your friends you were ill
Because you wanted us to flower,
create our art, unblighted by grief.
You had the courage for tragedy.
Trusted we would as well.
*
Time, that sleepless magpie,
thieved so much from you ‒
but I will not let it snatch
the silver apples of your songs
the golden apple of your laugh
*
You came to a small, white bread, Tory city,
in long black coat, blue eyes sips of sky, stood
on a Cathedral lawn beneath a twice-toppled steeple ‒
and as an army of twitchers trained telephoto lenses
on invisible peregrines, you played your bodhran
to curious students, oblivious shoppers, coiffed chihuahuas,
obscene SUVs, tired Stagecoach buses, Sophia’s falcon ‒
and there you are still, opposite Waterstones and Wetherspoons,
a Pidgin English Irishman drumming up Britain’s Babel
of sinklands and tower blocks, prophetae and plague pits ‒
Soho sirens, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, Sekhmet, the jinn,
Roundheads, Romans and Rastas, coopers, traders and hoodies,
Chagall’s psalm, Grenfell’s ashes, Blake’s Angels,
unreeling around you on the ecchoing green
*
The reason you have breast cancer
my oncologist told me
is because you have breasts.
Oh Niall, we’ve all fallen
asleep in the sun.
Please let us let
that one hot day
float free
blithe as a larkling
The reason you had skin cancer
is because you had skin
the white lambskin of your Northern kin
the thin parchment skin of a poet
the thrumming skin of a bodhran
and though that ‘black sun’ on your belly
proved a terrible beauty spot
the kind of ravaging beauty
it kills us to know
in your illness
in your humour
in London’s charms
and Julie’s arms
in poem after poem
impelled by the past
haunted by the future
struck by the moment
you became one
with the drum of the world
*
and our days are as grass
we flower among the toadstools —
those inky wigs, refulgent ruffled eggs
charged by a power beyond us
to divulge Earth’s grievous laws
*
if not in a grey dawn
where would black embrace white?
if the world was not hollow
how would love sound?
NOTE. Poet, musician and London ‘poetopographer’ Niall McDevitt lived with cancer for six years. A gelatinous spot
on his abdomen, initially diagnosed as a ‘jelly mould’, proved to be malignant; although its colour was atypical of skin
cancer, Niall, in an unpublished poem, referred to his melanoma as a ‘black sun’. The phrase ‘the incandescent grass’
is from the poem ‘Liberty Caps’ in Niall’s debut collection b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010).
David Francis
Our Street
Down the drowsy drizzly street
by the winter scarecrow tree
a line of parked cars,
the lousy models
there is a lot
of brown brambles
and lint-white trash
where the tinker lives
before
the sidewalk slopes
crookeding the foundations
of the narrow houses
in the little room
between the doors
I hide
then
up the street
I wander
where the blare, scrape
and scare of morning
mouthes:
the silent individuals
tread by
toward the subway
down, again,
the others, mostly women
eating ham and chatting
march toward the sweatshop
at the end of the street
wan black birds
and gulls from the canal
fly over the brick monstrosity.
Van of Juveniles
Some “juveniles” just went by in a van,
their faces so dark in the night darkness
and they looked at me and I looked at them
huddled, guarded, indistinct, in transit;
myself at an outdoor cafe table
spotlit, and them waiting for the red light.
Their chief problem, like ours, is to kill time
but we are outside, free, oblivious;
they are like the inert scattered leaves of fall
dark-bound for the prison population:
the great waste of the undeclared empire,
the kept secret that we share among them.
But if you have ever been a teacher
you resent them and care for them much more
than you can admit to in your comfort
because they are part of your suffering
from the same target of hypocrisy,
the same angry arrow missing its mark.
Simon Freedman
Your Own Light
Hold none but your true self in high esteem,
in galleries deserted hang your art;
in this life let your own light reign supreme.
The right word is whichever word you deem,
no moral truth exists outside your heart,
hold none but your true self in high esteem.
The bright ones aren’t as brilliant as they seem,
your truth shines clearer when you stand apart,
in this life let your own light reign supreme.
The swaying hordes can never shape your dream,
their trust more deadly than a poison dart,
hold none but your true self in high esteem.
Though tongues may wag and petty minds may scheme,
the rain falls sweet on those who trust their heart,
in this life let your own light reign supreme.
The world forgot to hear your silent scream,
it still belonged to you right from the start.
Hold none but your true self in high esteem;
in this life let your own light reign supreme.
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