Monday, September 12, 2011

White Peak Poems

Here are the five poems I wrote whilst in the Southern Peak District last week:

September 6th, 2011

badger/angel

for DOLLYman

he thuds into the earth,
great white beast,
shedding ashen feathers all over the road

something savage
has sought out his heart
(sensing its extraordinary sweetness)

death has already spread her cape
over his back and begun to work him,
licking his ears with a coal-wet tongue

hours later, he’s nothing
but ink and oil, and dank night pool;
nothing but the road

September 6th, 2011

September Heron (First Day Back At School)

A heron smartly rises from the brook:
one sheet of 100mg A3 ivory paper, cut
with a craft knife and crisply folded
at acute angles, given a deft stroke
of charcoal and hung over a yellow compass;
it rises, and it soars.

September 7th, 2011

Under hawthorn and hazels
which hand the rain down
leaf to leaf, drop by drop,
we wait by the weir, daughter
and mother, easily talking;
the sound of the rain
and the sound of the weir.

September 8th, 2011

The Roaches

I

The peregrine falcon hangs on the wind
above rocks the colour of ravens.

She turns, and the weather turns
with her wing-tip flash: the tarn flares
and walkers become bright as gorse flowers;
the fawn and violet of early heather
find their way into the pine trunks
and mushrooms like golden eggs are found in the grass.

Then back they come, the clouds as dark as bogs,
seeping into the grass; pine-barks gloss over
and the truths of heather’s bruises surface;
walkers run for cover, the tarn turns
its shutters, and the falcon soaks up the dark
of the raven-rocks in her far-spread wings.



















II

A laugh on the wind
is snatched by a crow;
the crow’s throat-rattle
shivers through the pines;
the pines’ needle-shimmy
is rallied by chiff-chaffs,
hidden in the scrub
by the trail that we wind up,
talking, and laughing.

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