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 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.
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.
By Anna Kamienska
Translated from Polish by Stanislave Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh A profile is here
What’s it like to be human
the bird asked
I myself don’t know
it’s being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity
being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity
being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful
being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat
breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly
it’s being on fire
with a nest made of ashes
eating bread
while filling up on hunger
it’s dying without love
it’s loving through death
That’s funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air
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 Valerie Mejer (trans. Forrest Gander)
Nothing’s in the nest. No needles. No newborn ravens.
Maybe something like night in the deep hollow,
an eggshell planet, cracked in the middle, an empty bowl of soup.
Nothing’s in the nest. No thread. No web of words.
Maybe something like my navel, the eclipse of a magnifying glass.
A slice, mute with regard to its empty depths
In the nest, nothing. The web unwoven. Dismembered.
In the space, something, yes. A piece of cloth. Sounding like flags
taking wing, a worm in its beak and suddenly, eyes my eyes
which cutting across the empty air, direct themselves at something noiseless over there.
By Mary Oliver
Profile at The Poetry FoundationYou do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and i will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
By Ruth Stone
Can it be that
memory is useless,
like a torn web
hanging in the wind?
Sometimes it billows
out, a full high gauze –
like a canopy.
But the air passes
through the rents
and it falls again and flaps
shapeless
like the ghost rag that it is –
hanging at the window
of an empty room.
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 