In the lull, the afternoon sun warms
the linseed field. The flowers are quiet,
their bright subdued in the green
while the mind wanders
to the emerald mosque upon the hill,
built around a flowing spring,
the easy absolutions and ablutions
in that mosque where the spring water
has been let loose to meander
over marble courtyards and inner chambers,
across the geometric, green-tiled floor that
cools the heels of the faithful.
I press my brow to cold glass – two women, head to head: your face tilts like a ship’s prow challenging the wind, morning sky over the North Sea in your salt-washed cheeks and eager, blue-green eyes. Your hair falls like mine from a centre parting, though holds no trace of grey in its peat brown sweep. Five thousand years between us, and yet not a moment, it seems – recognition like that spark you’d know how to strike from stone. Thought tugs at your mouth’s harbour, a half-smile about to slip its mooring into laughter.
Your skull lies beside you, mute echo, shell-white in spotlit stillness – every curve and crevice mapped by expert minds: your mask their exquisite calculation, more real to me than any excavated bone.
Did you sleep, wake, love and weep in the dark air of honeycomb chambers built by shores I’ve only glimpsed from plane and car – my stay too short and anyway, my timing out of season? I want to know you, unknown woman, walk with you the cliffs at Silwick, tread the paths of Scalloway, hear your language beat the air again with skua, scart and arctic tern, learn your life, those days that stretched behind your step, and (though you couldn’t guess their end would come too soon) gave you such a fearless gaze of hope.
Stop! Let the water of the coffee boil, Tell me about İstanbul, how was it? Tell me about Bosphorus, how was it? June is washed by the runaway rains with vibrations, Would that seven hills get dried by Such a hot sun like a mother’s care…
Tell me people laughed there, In trains, ferries, buses. I like it even if it’s a lie, say it. Always agony, always agony, always agony Had enough…
Stop! Let it stay, don’t turn the TV on Tell me about İstanbul, how was it? Tell me about the city of cities, how was it? While looking in my forbidden eyes from the hills of Beyoglu, Make compliments about bridges, Sarayburnu, minarets, and Haliç. Could you say a hello, secretly…
Tell me people laughed there, In trains, ferries, buses. I like it even if it’s a lie, say it. Always agony, always agony, always agony Had enough…
Stop! Leave it, don’t move stay like that, please Your scent is like İstanbul, and your eyes like İstanbul nights. Now come and hug, hug me the one with henna. Under the sky, just there together The dream of starting over by saying thanks to god Is like a river in the desert of your longing.
Tell me people laughed there, In trains, ferries, buses. I like it even if it’s a lie, say it. Always agony, always agony, always agony Had enough…
Posted before, but simply too good to pass over
In the lull, the afternoon sun warms the linseed field. The flowers are quiet,
their bright subdued in the green while the mind wanders
to the emerald mosque upon the hill, built around a flowing spring,
the easy absolutions and ablutions in that mosque where the spring water
has been let loose to meander over marble courtyards and inner chambers,
across the geometric, green-tiled floor that cools the heels of the faithful.
Too many cracks precede the spectacular breaking. Each
story begins in a different dark- ness. And light: think how it catches
on any surface (pane or hinge or keyhole) and
out of night (out of nothing), all at once: a window,
a door. It’s a metaphor (and then it isn’t), darkness.
When I dream again it’s the old kitchen—I
open the oven and sound, like ropes of heat, drifts
out; a shimmering. Familiar and confusing. Uncanny,
and then unmistakable: our voices, recorded. Playback
and loop, now—every aching word we whispered here.
I dreamed you.
I waited 45 years for you
to find me.
I have nothing to give you
But these places
I have been.
I own no home.
I carry my life with me
In boxes
on my back.
Sometimes when you look
at me
I want to show you
Everything.
How the stars turn in the
night sky over Santa Fe.
How snow falls like filigree
through a blue moon.
How a slice
of sweet Hawaiian
Mountain apple
between your lips
calls forth the
forest
it was plucked from.
I want to take you places
You have never been.
With anyone.
I want to tell you everything.
How once when I was 26
I drove around and around
searching for other Lesbians.
I want to show you every scar.
I want to tell you about
Anita and Parker.
How death came for them
In the name of cancer
claiming parts of me
you can never have.
I want to whisper
Everything.
As you stall into my
shoulder
Incense rising,
dusky room.
I was thinking thoughts that fit me
walking in the forest, raindrops dropping on me from the trees
I found myself arriving here and there
and always, everywhere, I knew, was the right place for me.
On this kindly yellow day of mild low-travelling winter sun
The stirless depths of the yews
Are vague with misty blues:
Across the spacious pathways stretching spires of shadow run,
And the wind-gnawed walls of ancient brick are fired vermilion.
Two or three early sanguine finches tune
Some tentative strains, to be enlarged by May or June:
From a thrush or blackbird
Comes now and then a word,
While an enfeebled fountain somewhere within is heard.
Our footsteps wait awhile,
Then draw beneath the pile,
When an inner court outspreads
As ’twere History’s own asile,
Where the now-visioned fountain its attenuate crystal sheds
In passive lapse that seems to ignore the yon world’s clamorous clutch,
And lays an insistent numbness on the place, like a cold hand’s touch.
And there swaggers the Shade of a straddling King, plumed, sworded, with sensual face,
And lo, too, that of his Minister, at a bold self-centred pace:
Sheer in the sun they pass; and thereupon all is still,
Save the mindless fountain tinkling on with thin enfeebled will.
SOMETIMES, I HEAR SINGING.
EARLY IN THE MORNING
WHEN THE MIST LIFTS AND WISPS ITS WAY
ACROSS THE BLUE-BLACK BACK OF THE WATER
OR LATE
WHEN THE LAKE ROLLS AND MOANS
BENEATH ITS STAR-STREWN BLANKETS
THIS LAKE HAS A VOICE.
IT’S IN THE WHISTLE OF AUTUMN WINGS ACROSS THE WATER
LOW AND SOFT AND GONE.
IT’S IN THE SUN-KISSED LIGHT OF SPRING
MELTING A WINTER’S ICE
DROP, BY DROP, BY DROP.
IT’S IN THE SUMMER WIND
STRUMMING THE WAVES
THE SLOW, REPEATING VERSE OF THE SURF.
THIS LAKE HAS A VOICE.
I HEARD IT MOST CLEARLY ONCE
CAMPED DEEP IN THE THROAT OF A CANYON
THAT BELLOWS ITS RIVER
STRAIGHT INTO THE LAKE
IN ONE SWIFT LEAP … SSSSSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
IT’S ONLY THE SOUND OF THE WATERFALLS
THEY TOLD ME.
OF COURSE IT IS,
I SAID
AND DIDN’T BELIEVE THEM.
THERE IS NO NEED TO BELIEVE ONLY THE OBVIOUS
TO HEAR
ONLY THE SOUND OF WATER
WHERE THERE ARE
VOICES
SOFTLY SINGING.
Today's poem is no poem.
But a short piece of writing by Lorand Gaspar.
On my way back to Belfast I wandered past Bebelplatz, smelled the air for burning books, glanced at Brandenburg Tor, and went to that open field, Potsdamer Platz. I chewed the alien words until, like the Berlin Wall, my trust in language simply collapsed.
Bordered by dead grass and foot-churned mud, the long barrier, thick as memory, attacks the horizon– a concrete scalpel slicing through the city. I move to touch it: rough, strong, as dirty as politics.
A fresh hole smashed into the Soviet concrete allowed noisy graffiti to frame East Germany. I clasped a hook of rebar and swung myself up onto the back of history. I straddled the Wall, one foot here, the other there, while a helicopter thumped in the distance, its angry rotor reminding me of home, of Belfast. I close my eyes and hover above the city of my birth– the puff of tear gas, the pop of bombs, funeral processions that twist through flag-ridden streets. The Peace Line, thick as memory, slices the city in two, cleaving hate from hate.
Again in the middle of Potsdamer Platz, I look from side to side, and reassure the worried concrete that there is still work to be done.
We would be snaking up Loch Lomond, the road narrow and winding after the turn at Tarbert, and we’d be bending branches as we slid through the green and dripping overhang of the trees. All the bickering over the packing, and the – as usual – much, much later-than-we’d-meant-to leaving, all that falling from us, our moods lifting, lightening, becoming our good mood the more miles we put between our freed and weekend selves and Glasgow.
Driving in the dark means: slot in another CD without even looking at what it is, another any-old-silver-disc from the zippered case that, when you reminded me, I’d have quickly stuffed far too full and randomly, then jammed it, last minute, into the top of my rucksack. Golden oldies, yours or mine, whose favourite? Anyway, the music would spool us through Tyndrum, past the shut Real Food Café where other days we like to stop, and over moonscape Rannoch Moor to the moonlit majesty of Glencoe, over the bridge at Ballachulish, past Corran with the ferry stilled and the loch like glass; we’d be wriggling along Loch Linnhe then straighten up past the long strip of darkened lochside Big hotels and their Vacancies or No Vacancies signs to 30 mph Fort William – Full-Of-Rain-Town-With-Its-Limitless-Litres-In-A-Mist! – we’d shout it out and we’d be honouring a long ago and someone else’s family pass-the-time-car- journey game we never even played, but Michael, proud of his teenage wordsmith son, once told us about – and it has stuck. We’d be speeding up now, taking the bend’s wide sweep as we bypass the sleeping town, making for the second-last turn-off: Mallaig and The Road To The Isles. And you’d say, ‘Last thirty miles, Lizzie, we’ll be there by midnight.’
The always longest fifteen miles from Glenfinnan to Lochailort and a wee cheer at the last turn, down past the big house and the fish farm, beyond the lay-by – full of travellers’ ramshackle vans now the yellow’s on the broom again – our eyes peeled now for the white-painted stone so we’ll not miss the overgrown entrance to the field of caravans.
There would be that sigh of always glad-to-see our old van still standing, opening the door, the sniffing – no dampness, no mice… I’d be unloading the first cool bags of food, while you’d be round the van’s side, down in the mud turning the stopcock for the water, fixing the gas – and soon, breathing a big sigh, laughing in relief at how that huge stag that had suddenly filled the windscreen a mile back stopping our hearts as – ho! – we’d shouted our alarm – had somehow astonishingly leapt free, was gone, and no harm done, we’d be lighting candles, pouring a dram, drinking the first cup of tea from the old black and white teapot.
And tonight the sky would be huge with stars. Tomorrow there would be the distant islands cut out of sugar paper, or else cloud, the rain in great veils coming in across the water, the earliest tenderest feathering of green on the trees, mibbe autumn laying bare the birches stark white. There would be blood-red rowan berries, that bold robin eating from my plate again, or – for a week or two in May – the elusive, insistent cuckoo, or else the slow untidy flapping of the flight of the heron, the oil-black cormorant’s disappear-and-dive, shifts of sun, double or even treble rainbows. The waterfall would be a wide white plume or a thin silver trickle, depending… There would be bracken’s early unfurling or late summer’s heather pinking and purpling over, there’d be a plague of hairy caterpillars and the last drunken bees. Mibbe you’d nudge me, and hushed, again we’d watch that otter swim to shore on New Year’s Day with a big fish in its mouth, emerge so near us on the flat rocks we wouldn’t dare to breathe as we’d watch it, unconcerned, oblivious, make a meal of eating it before our eyes. Or it would be a late Easter this year and, everywhere along the roadside, the chrome-yellow straight-out-of-the-tube-and- laid-on-with-a-palette-knife brashness, the amazing coconut smell of the gorse.
But tonight you are three months dead and I must pull down the bed and lie in it alone. Tomorrow, and every day in this place these words of Sorley MacLean’s will echo through me: The world is still beautiful, though you are not in it. And this will not be a consolation but a further desolation.
Marikkou: even if you are middle aged And your hair is almost completely white You are a queen worth all my singing praise Fine woman, still holding yourself upright.
This makes young ladies green with jealousy My dear, it seems they cannot stand you Knowing they are inferior, they hang Their heads in shame and blame their clothes and country.
Since the day you got engaged so recklessly And left me lying in the fields alone I stumble blindly, living desperately The way you see me now, vexed and alone.
When you used to follow me it seemed No one better roamed the world than I But behind me a big misfortune streamed And now I sit here wasting all my life.
The sight of hills and mountains break my heart The hills and mountains that you roamed, my dove Remind me of my dark and star-crossed lot And make me love you even more, my love.
When we first fell in love, oh Marikkou Your breasts had only just began to form We met each other on the mountainside You and your baby goats trotting along.
I wonder if you ever bring to mind The hollow trunk of that Vasilis' olive tree The one you hid in when the heavens opened I entered, too, and kissed you on the lips.
That olive tree, I bought it, it's now mine Its fruit holds every memory of you More precious than a diamond, so it shines Its shade my only consolation, too.
Grey brick upon brick, Declamatory bronze On sombre pedestals – O’Connell, Grattan, Moore – And the brewery tugs and the swans On the balustraded stream And the bare bones of a fanlight Over a hungry door And the air soft on the cheek And porter running from the taps With a head of yellow cream And Nelson on his pillar Watching his world collapse.
This never was my town, I was not born or bred Nor schooled here and she will not Have me alive or dead But yet she holds my mind With her seedy elegance, With her gentle veils of rain And all her ghosts that walk And all that hide behind Her Georgian facades – The catcalls and the pain, The glamour of her squalor, The bravado of her talk.
The lights jig in the river With a concertina movement And the sun comes up in the morning Like barley-sugar on the water And the mist on the Wicklow hills Is close, as close As the peasantry were to the landlord, As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish, As the killer is close one moment To the man he kills, Or as the moment itself Is close to the next moment.
She is not an Irish town And she is not English, Historic with guns and vermin And the cold renown Of a fragment of Church latin, Of an oratorical phrase. But oh the days are soft, Soft enough to forget The lesson better learnt, The bullet on the wet Streets, the crooked deal, The steel behind the laugh, The Four Courts burnt.
Fort of the Dane, Garrison of the Saxon, Augustan capital Of a Gaelic nation, Appropriating all The alien brought, You give me time for thought And by a juggler’s trick You poise the toppling hour – O greyness run to flower, Grey stone, grey water, And brick upon grey brick.
Ploo’d rigs an a bing a waar, Hay for turnin idda swaar, Mossy paets aroond da fire, Willie muckin oot da byre, Da bran mash at da calf wis fed, An da tae laek kootch at faider med.
Yule girse growin near da burn, Da brünie I forgot ta turn, Haet kettles at wir black wi ime, New picter books at Christmastime, Dip, an hedder at da crü, An reestit mutton ribs wi brü.
Herreen nets an tarry twine, A skurt a claes in fae da line, Bacha reek fae strowng black twist, Camphor idda blanket kjist, Da haet sun ’pun a moory broo, An fluffy peerie kettleens’ oo.
Whin da sun clims higher idda sky, An da hidmist fans trow da ditches lie, Dan comes da time I feel dat I Man geng an see Da place, whaar nedder kith nor kin O mine is ever bidden in, Yit every time A’m dere I fin Dearer ta me.
Whin idder laand is lyin weet, Dere da aert is springin aneath me feet, An da laverick’s singin, fit ta spleet, High up abün. An whin fok ir delled whaat dey hae ta dell, An da aerly lambs can maet demsel, Hit’s dan you can fin da mayflooers’ smell, Laet efternün.
Dey kline da knowes an banks an rigs, An roond da kiln whaar da blackbird bigs, An sproot fae da sides o da burn brigs Fornenst da green. An laek peerie bairns sayin dir graces, Da kockiloories lift dir faces, An growe far bigger dere dan in idder places Whaar A’m been.
Bit da time I tink I laek da maest Is whin da maa’in girse is tae me waist, An dir aye a rabbit or twa ta shaest Up ower da braes. Da scent o hay, an da smell o waar, Da swish o da sye o da busy maa’er, Fat bees dat flit fae swaar ta swaar, Waarm, simmer haze.
Dan whin hairst is hintin idda air, Da coarn head’s heavy an ready ta shaer, Shun rigs o stubble, aert dow’d an bare Whaar simmer blissed er. Boats ir draa’n up ta da head o da noost Whaar da dockens staand laek bolts o roost. Noo da aert can sleep, for da hairst is coosed At Fladdabister.
