Poems
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,
... (read more)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.
... (read more)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
... (read more)(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.
... (read more)High, bright winter’s morning: the tenements’ bare tree-antlers clattering
on each corner and the stepping black spines smooth and glossy
as mirages; framed, the scene shines as if transported to a desert, and never
... (read more)Ter Borch would know him, this latter-day companion
of the cavalryman bowed on his mount,
shoulders and haunches sapped with exhaustion: and Sherman,
bright-eyed, red-handed, a hellion to order:
and the mailed believers of Krak.
The music stopped
This had been expected.
Paintings were stilled
And books lay mute.
... (read more)Torrid noon, I’m high in my mulberry harvest.
So, what is it with this tree? Lower branches, I click
quickly left or right – fingers safebreaker light
on the gorged capsules, and they detach,
drop, thuk and whole into my plastic bucket.
Yet from the tree-peak where the fattest fruit
clusters against the sun, O I must pinch
and wrest until the berries burst like bloodspray.
... (read more)Her hand in mine
she walks looking back
at all the bright colours –
that’s a funny man.
She says what she feels
and teaches me what I thought I used to know.
The warmth of her hand
the sense that she will never let go,
even though her body
is twisting back to examine
a piece of glass with writing on it.
... (read more)In ABR's seventh 'Poem of the Week' Stephen Edgar discusses and reads his poem 'Man on the Moon'.
... (read more)
