A poem is not meant to be comfortable It should irritate like a seed stuck between teeth Or a stone in a shoe.
The reader should feel something Of what the writer wept through – Should find the meaning as slippery to extricate as a broken yolk in a bowl of albumen. Yet eventually it should nestle in the palm of mind Intact and satisfying as a clearly separated egg.
How can I say what a poem is? Poems are empty shells For hermit crabs of other people’s feelings.
A poem-maker has been infested like a cat with fleas. The words spring down, cool off upon a page then jump into the mind of an unwary passer-by who does not realise he has been bitten until they wake him in the night.
But poems are only words in a certain order Making a certain shape upon a page And rhythm in the ear. They are lies, certainly. How can reality be represented except by fabrications?
One day in summer As I lay down full-length upon the grass Beside a cliff-top path And saw within my arm’s extended range A hundred shades of green, I knew no poet, no painter Could replicate each detailed variation of every leaf and stem the scents and sounds of sap rising, uncountable, miniscule, creatures scurrying.
I’m not surprised you don’t like poetry – It’s quite inadequate. Yet I feel compelled to gather souvenirs As I meander along my hours and minutes – Just as I bring home pebbles from the beach And bluebells from the wood.
BELONGING
At Kristian’s wedding yesterday you shifted roles as merrily as coloured glass in a kaleidoscope; daughter, sister, cousin, niece, patterning the ritual.
Today your books and bedding, spider plants Posters and goldfish, cram the Volksvagon. I notice autumn in the trees edging the motorway
Where Time becomes freight, extended or condensed around the passengers of every separate car.
Inside our capsule, roles lose relevance; we are suspended in conversation as cushioning as amniotic fluid until I brake outside your student’s house where faces at the window draw you in.
Caught between roles, I am exposed to childish thoughts of a rock-door slamming shut in the Mountain beyond Hamelyn.
