- Poetry
Poetry
This Poem
This poem wears green eye shadow, and rainbow lipstick
This poem doesn’t own a clock, but knows how one ticks
This poem says – Wham, Bam, Thank You – Sir
This poem sports politically correct faux fur
This poem drives a silver Aston Martin DB4
With fluffy dice, fat wheels and four on the floor
It’s automatic, systematic and culturally clued
This poem rhymes when it doesn’t have to
This poem gives – and gets – oral pleasure
This poem is like, yeah, you know, whatever
This poem is gold-dipped, glitter-dusted and fairy-wanded
It knows a life half lived is a whole life squandered
This poem remembers a time before cellulite
This poem’s a pacifist but loves a good fight
This poem is bound for glory, this poem
Yee haa
This poem salutes irony, sarkiness and farce
This poem swaps showers for long soaks in the bath
This poem eats chocolate, and doesn’t brush its teeth,
This poem swims with dolphins, in the Great Barrier Reef
This poem has a personal trainer, but only for tea
This poem wears a singlet, and watches crap TV
This poem dyes its hair, and shows off its roots
This poem stands on one leg, and plays a small flute
This poem knows
when the writer is locked, and off floats the key
It can be whatever it needs to be.
This poem can fricassee, fillet a fish and quenelle
It’s a plus sized model on the cover of Elle,
It can strip wallpaper, plumb a kitchen and re-invent
But doesn’t give a toss of rocket cos it can only afford to rent
This poem is a greenie eco freaky nerd,
Cos it knows a poem is ultimately just recycled words.
Lisa D'Onofrio
The Painter of the Angels at Barton Turf
Long hours I worked, late into nights
when the milk of the moon lit my hand.
I had a team of painters with me –
bright-eyed youngsters and solid men
calm and capable with their brushes –
but it was my hand that drew the lines
that coaxed the nine orders of angels
into this church set in rippling fields.
One day, it seemed, the angels were empty
shapes; the next dawn they’d arrived
with a whisper of feathers, a hiss of silk,
on the good, strong feet I’d drawn for them.
They came clothed in scarlet feathers,
white ermine, rose damask,
smelling faintly of incense and lilies,
of palm branches and ringing steel:
Seraphim, burning red with love;
golden Cherubim, all-seeing;
green-winged Thrones, Dominions,
blue Virtues; devil-scourging Powers;
Principalities, Archangels in armour,
and Angels guarding naked souls.
All this was eight centuries ago.
but still they glow in dappled light,
listening to prayers, readings and song,
and rooks and sparrows taking flight.
Caroline Gilfillan
Syleham Light
At Syleham bridge
light from nowhere paints
abstracts on the tree-lined river:
modern art on ancient canvas
A ladder leads into troubled water
and an empty bench waits for the right man
or woman
Not quite angel country
but rumours of a dove persist
somewhere upstream
and the bright white walls of
Tollbridge Cottage
stand sentry for free
as needles weave summer
into patchwork veins
and the usual suspects
pretend to leave
Here is the Book
Here on the edge of a drowned world
land of the True Cross
we walk on the moon, dark side,
among marbled pillars
touching unearthly colours
dusty passages
fingering forgotten legends
Treasure buried in the priory
where foreign knights battle secretly
against skeletons
and in the Kingdom of God
near Bromholm
the dead are raised
Iron stands like spears against the sun
while stone dissolves
As in the beginning
the word breathes on
until the void takes form
becomes a sacred, fertile field
Visions of Hildegard or Agnes in the rain
play dark tricks
as the world folds into paper,
holding on
Ruins bought and sold
breathe again
words emerge from the rock:
locks are broken
Burning kingfishers perch on fallen walls:
paths burst from the undergrowth
Here on the edge of the moon
Here is the book
Here are the letters thrown down and lifted up
Here the rushing wind
fire and water
laid like a cloth of gold and silver
under the patient stars
Poet's comment: This was written for the Paston Project in 2008 and draws on many aspects of the work, especially history and the surrounding countryside – and of course the book itself.
Leaf
From the womb of the woman
and the heart of the man
a new tree grows
Through each fragile leaf
a narrow way opens
to other worlds:
a way like birth containing pain
and ecstasy
Drops of blood like light
pour through the darkness:
strange dew defeating time and space,
blotting out the stench
of decay:
turning the universe over
healing the curse of chaos
The tree survives flood and famine
dances to the music of eternity
Immensity
Something immense and lonely
Divides the earth between us this evening.
I have placed the photographs of you
In my inside jacket pocket
As every lover does perhaps,
A million miles and four nights out of touch.
I have cut up turf
At the back of my mother’s house
And have watched the way earth
Turns itself over like my restless sleep.
You understand double your years
My soul as it breaks surface
And I imagine the rich soil in your palms,
Would that it could be
Just the distance between us tonight.
Intercepted light
She watches shadows dip beneath the door,
swirling to the rhythm of the blades,
the push and pull of brown Bakelite whir.
Her fingers trace the swell of thigh to hip,
belly bump to ribs. Out in the dusty street
conversation splashes on to brick.
Next door the shower gurgles, as, within,
her heart maintains its sturdy, even thud,
reminding her that under her cloak of skin
she, too, pulses like intercepted light.
She too is rock and rolling out of sight.
Caroline Gilfillan
Cracks in Canvas
I thought I heard you crying.
Or the sky.
I thought gulls were cracks in canvas.
Or their cries.
I thought tears were hanging from your lashes.
Not from mine.
I thought I heard you screaming.
Or a jet.
I thought I caught seas jumping from a brush.
Or finches twisting in a net.
I thought I heard you dreaming.
Or the earth.
I thought I would catch you falling from your blushes,
Not in death.
I thought loaded knives of light were life,
Not beached anguish in the nightmare
Of this breath, this breadth
Of skin – this 'scape of sky and sea;
This falsity, these lies.
I thought I heard you dying.
And the sky.
I thought gulls were cracks in canvas.
Or your eyes
In strokes of noiseless gashes
Bloody from the vine.
I just thought I heard you crying,
Girl of my ashes.
Rupert Mallin
Art School
Chalk and charcoal net these images,
Hard edged or smeared with fingers:
A bottle wrapped by lines laid
Line over line to restrain
My interpretation of the real.
Yours is 'truth to materials.'
You pick up steel and see steel,
Not the stain of a black forest
In a sheet of tarnished aluminium.
Yours is 'truth to morals.'
You handle wood and see wood,
Not the pain of a breach–birth
In the handle of a hammer.
Yours is 'truth to money.'
You model clay and see clay,
Not murder's grey estuary
Or worms going down for air.
There is no denotative tool or bag of tricks
For reality has no measure but the quick
Of gestures marked upon a pane of light.
I scratch and scrape at the sun to escape
But in line upon line I am caged.
Rupert Mallin
Still Life
I am the black line beside each vein,
Leisurely, luxurious, deep as an ocean,
Thinner than cotton.
I hang from horizons
Behind breeze teased underwear,
Flat and fluttering upon the land.
Or curl up beside bones,
Orchestrating my growth to violins
Within the scaffolding.
I tighten the skin drum,
Lie thick in napkins,
Bleed all corners
Of simple symmetry. I am
Neither fillet nor feather,
Though I am that to which I cling.
Am a cavernous ghost
In a crevice, impossible to fill.
Emptiness is my fuel
In the cold ash of ovens,
In a duct not a tear,
Too small for forensic.
Am beneath all, invisible,
Until lifted from the soil,
Like stories, like holes.
I hog fridges and kilns,
Make a home of a scream
And am paint's illusion.
I am essential.
Rupert Mallin
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