by Gillian Clarke
Plainsong of owl
moonlight between crucieform
shadows of hunting.
She sings again
closer
in the sycamore,
her coming quieter
than the wash
behind the wave,
her absence darker
than privacy
in the leaves’ tabernacle.
Compline.Vigil.
Stations of the dark.
A flame floats on oil
in her amber eye.
Shoulderless shadow
nightwatching.
Kyrie. Kyrie.
By Billy Collins
A profile is here at the Poetry Foundation
The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.
They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.
By Julia Copus
A biogrpahy is here a the Royal Literary Fund
for Antony and David
Impossible to picture a time without it there
beneath the living room window, afloat in the shadows
of our father’s desk. Its flattened tassels were the rays of sun
in a child’s drawing; it was where we must gather,
three breathless children, our coats on for school,
or to show who was first to be ready for bed,
and if we’d a score to settle
this was where we must do it.
When was the last time we stood there,
myself and my two, fly brothers,
in the days before their bodies hardened and wives
and children hovered round them?
It is late, perhaps – a splash of moon at the window.
Outside, a row of curtained houses
looks blindly away from two small boys and their sister,
who have not even thought to arrange the order
of their going. Nonetheless there must be one
who steps off ahead of the others, as if at some whisper
from the wings, and does not think to look back.
Tonight, in the small hours, I stand there again
in the shadows that leaked from the oak-dark desk;
only this time I am stiller, keener, I’m
poised, like Cassandra – listening out
for those wily, soft-voiced exit cues,
with both knees locked, my fists and eyes
squeezed, clenched, so that nothing exists
but brothers and me and the orange rug,
round as a spotlight, round as a sun,
and the hum of its solar wind unspent inside it.
by Sam Riviere
a biography is here at the Poetry Foundation
I could see clouds in my coffee
clouds in my phone
satellites like the skeletons of dragonflies
were orbiting the planet
from the train I saw a cloud of birds
wow there were birds in my coffee
birds in my phone
as if everything on earth were texting
furiously everything else I could feel
their texts arriving in my body
this has been a blue/green message
exiting the social world
I could see clouds in my coffee
clouds in my phone
satellites like the skeletons of dragonflies
were orbiting the planet
from the train I saw a cloud of birds
wow there were birds in my coffee
birds in my phone
as if everything on earth were texting
furiously everything else I could feel
their texts arriving in my body
this has been a blue/green message
exiting the social world
She’s lying under a low wind
bedded in mud and afterbirth.
her three dead lambs
knotted in a plastic bag.
Crows have pecked out her arse
and now the hen
that’s been circling all morning
tugs at a string of birth-meat
like she’s pulling a worm in the yard.
I can’t not watch.
I too lay stunned
in my own dirt
the miscarried child
guttering out,
soaking the mattress in blood.
I was afraid to look down
for what I might see –
a human face, a fist.
Yet once it was done I got up,
gathered my bedding
and walked.
The whiskey stink of rot has settled
in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises
when I touch the dying tomato plants.
Still the claws of tiny yellow blossoms
flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots
and toss them in the compost.
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village
as they pulled the flax. Songs so old
and so tied to the season that the very sound
seemed to turn the weather.
Each one is a gift, no doubt,
mysteriously placed in your waking hand
or set upon your forehead
moments before you open your eyes.
Today begins cold and bright,
the ground heavy with snow
and the thick masonry of ice,
the sun glinting off the turrets of clouds.
Through the calm eye of the window
everything is in its place
but so precariously
this day might be resting somehow
on the one before it,
all the days of the past stacked high
like the impossible tower of dishes
entertainers used to build on stage.
No wonder you find yourself
perched on the top of a tall ladder
hoping to add one more.
Just another Wednesday
you whisper,
then holding your breath,
place this cup on yesterday’s saucer
without the slightest clink.
By Marion McCready
There is no escaping the storm of roses
crisscrossed on the split-cracked wall
of a dead fountain arch.
There is no escaping their uterine balls
expanding as a reminder of the children I never had.
If you listen carefully you can hear the vibrations,
the heart drone of their petal jaw-harps.
And there’s no going back,
no indiscovery of Mars
or those red planets brooding before me,
light predators, sun hatched
and bloodening like the fists of women
who have gone to war.
By Jo Shapcott
Indoors for this ash
is through the bark;
notice its colour –
asphalt or slate in the rain –
then go inside, tasting
weather in the tree of rings,
scoffing years of drought and storm,
moving as fast as a woodworm
who finds a kick of speed
for burrowing into the core,
for mouthing pith and sap
until the O my god at the heart.
A Flight of Cranes 