Poems

Well, it’s been waiting all these years, like a poem

            asleep in the word-hoard, its prince to come,

kiss at the ready, and bloom it forth to the world:

            or like a kouros, hauled with pain

from the gnarling waters, smiling gaze intact,

            its maker long put out to sea:

or like that ‘orient and immortal wheat’ that waved

            before Traherne, a child bereft,

and set him claiming Paradise again:

            yes, it’s here for the restless heart –

The American Express Gold Card Dress – and all

                        may now be well at last.

Come – no grazed knee, no tears, no –

no fear of darkness in the singing wood.

Hear the threnody written on the wind:

a lament not for lostness, no, but for the slow

path homewards, the pebbles which guide us:

The time’s come round again, blind pomegranates shine

In their dark bins like tawny Tuscan wine.

In the street

of my childhood

nothing is reliable.

There is no God, I was made in this man’s image:

those slate-dark eyes of his are mine,

the dented bridge of our his-my nose.

I laugh with his rasping cackle in me.

I walk with his stooping, trudging gait,

swearing his ‘Jesus bloody Christ’

in a sudden fist-curl of temper.

My right ear points like a flesh-antenna as his does,

and being my father I bear his name.

Haphazardries of kin passed on from birth

that to see him wizened on his cancer bed,

his insides turned to water,

for Craig Sherborne

‘Grief wrongs us so.’

                                                  Douglas Dunn

To the sea we bear our fathers in state –

or what they’ve done to them: the square conversions.

Surf mild as receding tides,

we slump in dunes with our burdens,

This must be a page from The Manual

For the Instructing of Humanity,

Showing the improvement of the Social Order

By the avoidance of personal identification

With Suffering, a turning-away to private Sanity.

The kookaburra begets the sacred kingfisher

who begets the rainbow bee-eater

who begets the firetailed finch

who begets the forty-spotted pardalote

who begets the damsel fly

who begets the jewelled beetle

who begets a pentangle of reflected light

that falls on a colony of dust mites

(from Peter Henry Lepus in ‘Iraq, 2003’)

Are all Arabs Muslims? Peter Henry asks.

Nobody answers him.

She’s got dark hair that stops

just above her shoulders.  Turns up at the ends.

She’s very slim, Max says.

He’s talking to Hamid

about Weasel Smith’s girlfriend,

whom he is hoping to meet

somewhere south of Baghdad.

In ABR's seventh 'Poem of the Week' Stephen Edgar discusses and reads his poem 'Man on the Moon'.