I open the window see electricity bleach the sky in far off codes of silence. The air is static pent with heat. I lie watching the curtains light up in morse as if a lighthouse dashes out rays […]
NPDMessages
Rule No. 2 of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
Jane Burden, his raven-haired lover stepping out of her curvilinear drapery is a naked model for Ecce Ancilla Domini. To study nature attentively: the abiding axiom. It is de rigueur: camera-like accuracy for a pink carnation lying on an open book, a collared dove or the opium poppy for Beata Beatrix, and, when he can’t […]
Triolet, triolet
All our operators are busy. You are moving forward in the queue. Your call is important to us. All our operators are busy. Please have your customer reference number, eight digit security code, Memorable name or date, and a credit or debit card to hand. All our operators are making love. You are moving forward […]
Jackdaw
after Charles Bukowski’s ‘Bluebird’ there’s a jackdaw in my head she’s in charge of the dark matter calls the shots from the back room light bulb swinging above her desk I hear her typing late at night the quiet genius that stays behind. now and then she pokes her beak through the trapdoor of […]
This too is art
Mondays, washing days, heaving sheets from one tub through the mangle into another tub on a wooden stand. Hands placing them, spacing them on a plastic line. This is street art where the westerly wind coming in from the beach takes the plumes from the iron works’ chimneys, lets them pass through this small town […]
Shakespeare Season
Rwanda, April 1994 The red dust road opens out to a schoolhouse where banana trees spread purple flowers unfurling sunlight, ready to fruit. In rough-cut classrooms the Hutu children sing praises to Imana under orders. The Tutsi children have been sent outside and stare in silence beyond the yard through pink angel-trumpets and yellow mimosas […]
Tree Talk
We are taller than your most extravagant tales. A drawn-out note on a mellowed cello Describes our skin, Our bark, roughened under wind and sun Ripples more slowly than the eye can follow. We are water, wood, sunlight; We are tree. We sense everything: The languid pop of mushrooms at our roots, The prickle of new […]
Urinal blocks
There, that stopped you. But it’s true. I could near as honestly have said the tomato leaves sweating in greenhoused sun, gaspingly awaiting our return and a slice of air; or the acid-prickled sweet of raspberry briar, with its drooping, insected load. Not cut grass. What’s unthinking idyll to you is work to me; thunder […]
An Open Letter from Greys Court
You’ve walked my halls and blooming gardens fair, Preserved me well across the endless years; It seems like only yesterday when I Was not much more than just a pile of bricks Atop a hill, just gazing down on the world Surveying the land which now I call my own. You fought a war outside […]
from We Are Writing a Poem about Home
Shukria: I can’t write about my Hazara people Who have suffered for decades In Afghanistan where they come from In Pakistan where they are murdered …. Rukiya: I don’t remember her In the summer, Lagoon water sizzling, The kingfisher leaping, Or even the sweet honey mangoes They tell me I used to love….. Ishmail ….I […]
Mr WH’s Reply
A summer’s day? Petal, that’s not me. Temperate I’m not, although I’ve got rough wind. My farts would fell a halitosic ox, and darling buds don’t stand a chance; don’t lease me summer – I prefer to buy. The eye of heaven I love (you never got to Tenerife), but yes, we do decline like […]
Mail Lady
mail lady. blue uniform brings packages and leaves directly, ponytail and boxy shirt wave back and forth, trying to catch up with her–already stepping into the truck with her very practical shoes. not starting up the engine until she makes eye contact with me. how many eyes does she see in a single day? it must […]
an essay on midges
as if all the letters had suddenly floated free of a paper and formed a swarm in the air; they form a swarm in the air, of all that bad news telling us nothing, those skimpy muses, wispy pegasuses, only abuzz with the hum of themselves, made from the last twist of smoke as the […]
Who Am I to Talk?
Who am I to talk about my dead fathers? Who am I to talk about those who fled their homes? Who am I to talk about the eyeless, legless, faceless men who fought for no reason at all? Who am I to talk about the shaken souls cutting off cow heads after they returned? Who […]
Locket
Too clumsy to ever wear. Thick, irregular ellipse. Clasp, hook, eyelet for the chain, wide enough to put an eye to. White tally marks where the catch has missed, Where the man opened, closed, and opened Seeing his face, her face, over and over, for the first time. May, 1915, they sent back the box. […]
no sister no
sister she ring me when i say i tell her Mama is used up gone and she say oh crap oh deary my word but she also say she not come and i use up the train to travel tracks and track over the airwaves mobile and she still insistent not come and all the […]
Modern Soldier
We gather, as minds do In petticoat parades, making our statements with our feet We are the wildflowers refusing Breaking out from your quadrats Climbing off the walls and onto the streets Underneath my corset is a ribcage In which my heart is contained It wears Balmoral boots A mackintosh coat A hair pin that […]
The Dream Speaks
In the mist, you must not speak. You must not move, flinch a muscle, an eye or an organ, you most certainly – must not bow. (Or remember what was, would be, what passed.) There is a bear waiting in the corner, and the hour of this mist welcomes you, in this ruined town, long […]
Harvest
Bad blood: mottled like abstract art where my mouth shut closed like a seashell; I wear it bottled, sour perfume to my ear to hear the hellish ocean call, high notes of choral madness. Brimstone-heavy in my pockets, I’ll dig the tip of the iceberg. This is some kind of excavation; I’ll confess it all […]
Minuscule
for a calligrapher All these feathery notations of pollen-fall & seed-scatter, all these burred & hair’s-breadth souls, all these friable clocks & keys, purses, ears, all these microbial explosions & quantum float-aways, are green secrets the wind keeps or doesn’t, flimsies the stream spins away or home – as if someone had grumbled ‘all flesh […]
‘You’re a snowdrop in snow’
said a man I knew, quite a friend, trying out the phrase. I watched snowdrops that winter. How straight they stood in the snow – up to their necks, their chins. It was the thaw that killed them. When my friend died, I searched his poems for the line. Was there love in it?
Bees
I’d only set out that afternoon to scout for bees. Father kept an eye on the cows. With my two jam jars down a bendy trail I tramped through dunes, far from the houses. The broken hive had been empty my twelve years. Waves seemed set to run and run, finding the pools. Rocky upward […]
Breaking the rules
We are forbidden to speak. I drum on the table when the guard walks away: dot-dot dot-dash dash-dash dash dash-dash-dash dash-dash The others are curious, one even taps out a jumble of long and short. I listen, hear nonsense, keep my eyes down, shake my head. I try each meal’s new neighbours: dot-dot dot-dash dash-dash […]
Place Name: Oracabessa
Oracabessa – origins disputed but most likely leave over from the Spanish. Oracabeza, Golden Head, though what gold was here other than light shining off the bay, other than bananas bursting out from red flowers? But this too is disputed – not the flowers […]
Goldfields
for Wol When our children ask how we met, I’ll tell them about the fork in the river, where a carpenter called James found flakes of gold. I’ll tell them this all happened long ago, before Great-grandmother was even born, and how the story passed from mouth to mouth to bind a seam around the […]
Gold Song 9
First before nothing was zero; that dark space a gap; the first baby could sing it; surprise at the brightness; the blackbirdsoaked morning; the lips a round gurgle; the first cry a tickle; turned into a flood. First cry was waiting for round lips to soften; the well up; surprise at the full stop. The […]
Stone written
Not a calm or a cool stone It still carries the charge of its birth the fracture of every wave smash the bruise of every pebble smash, every power hammer of the sea the jarring fall of every tide the percussive battery of stone slides as each pebble rubs its partner up the wrong way. […]
At Hajj
He had been in his own group, walking in a line with his hands around the waist of the man in front. His group had been snaking through the crowds like that for a few days. One morning he had been at the back of the line and he had felt the crowds closing in. […]
He wrote
He wrote his dying notes, aha, aha, a note in the night, a note at dawn if dawn it was, if dawn or lamp, if note it was, written or only thought, aha alone, aha, aha. There is a door but not that door, not his door now, the out-of-doors not […]
Letter to a Portuguese Cosmologist
The Universe has no doors and no edges. There is nothing stopping us from seeing what is going on in any direction except the cosmological horizon. – Pedro Ferreira, The State of the Universe You talk of Godel, truths that can’t be proved, the surface-of-last-scatter origins of light. You pit tokens of dark matter, […]
Birmingham Roller
We spent our lives down in the blackness… those birds brought us up to the light. – Jim Showell, Tumbling Pigeons and the Black Country Wench, yowm the colour of ower town: concrete, steel, oily rainbow of the cut. Ower streets am in yer wings, ower factory chimdeys plumes on yer chest, yer heart’s the […]
Hill Speak
There is no dictionary for my father’s language. His dialect, for a start, is difficult to name. Even this taxi driver, who talks it, lacks the knowledge. Some say it’s Pahari – ‘hill speak’ – others, Potwari, or Pahari-Potwari – too earthy and scriptless to find a home in books. This mountain speech is a […]
I took God with me camping
I took God with me camping. Here God- this is a tent. It leaks; round raindrops soak our bedclothes and we wake up with wet toes. This is my dominant friend, ordering the poles, when she doesn’t know what the hell she is doing. You made her God. These are my wellies. Thank you for […]
Crop Circles
Whatever the explanation sudden storm, a barrow’s shadow hoaxers with their planks and ropes a vortex movement of air we find ourselves returning to walk the wheat fields as if Ceres herself might appear in a cloak of poppies as if we could decipher language in rings of broken corn
Call
The middle of the night and the phone rings. Nothing. But someone is there. We listen to each other in the dark and quiet we listen there is between us not even breathing. Yet I know the moment I’m released what could be said will not now be said. A click; the neutral purr and […]
Conversations With my Father
Sometimes you call me on your own, now Mum, drugged up, sleeps more. I ask you how it goes; you speak of broken nights, pain’s ceaseless hum, new side effects. But what I want to know is how you’re doing. People rarely ask the carer how they manage all the tasks dictated by an illness […]