this is a poem I wrote yesterday in something of a frenzy, small edits
have been made afterwards. I feel very positively about this piece,
but I'd love it if you petcers could have a critical look at it; I'd
like to send it off to a magazine I have high regard for, called Anon.
your attention would mean a lot to me. thanks.
(the word "treasure!" is meant to be italicised)
"white skulls"
for eight days, an angular, bellowing machine
has pawed a gentle chaos in our garden
with the clumsy ease of a digging bear.
the slight rise by the stranded bricks
of a failed flowerbed is gone,
the tangle of a rattled, flowerless bush
is gone:
what's left is the groan of a damp land
released, having choked on the scuttled
bowels of its clay-mixed ship for decades.
it's not just me who feels breathing ease:
the grandad-appletree, gnarled from birth,
fixes a different wind in its hybrid limbs.
walking here, after the kind claw has gone,
is like touring a ruin¯except here
time is reset. sixty years evaporate
in the soil's softened, rearing-green sting.
the far end is a new place, heaven
given slender thorns¯a bullace plum
swaying new, nettle-moat lost.
at its root, cool dots on the kneaded loam,
are strange remnants: the first thought,
treasure! they are frail to see. to touch,
more precious than bone. the ghost of a snail
left a goodbye-swirl on its abandoned mask,
then let it bleach: not in terror, or from dark,
but from the tiny processes of dirt
that pressed the brown into their pores,
caused shining landshells to clicker up.
I gather them like pyramid berries,
like ceramic mushrooms
made by infinite hands.
their clack & stillness as I place them down
is that of the miracle of bones, the sigh
of thinning structures: white skulls
housing the sound of the world.
KS
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