One Day, I’ll Ask You Kindly
To dress me in a coat of patchworked fish skin,
A feather headdress of seagull, goose, duck,
swan.
Bestow upon me the name of Elfking
Underwater
Lead me to the barrow mound in Mulgrave
Woods
Its slopes a strewn alter of withered bones,
A shrine of skulls: from the little head-pans
Of mice, weasels, crows, and owls
To swine, stag, horse, bear, wolf and man,
Then let me light the tinder of my own pyre
That will flare so bright it’ll shame the
rising sun.
Whorlton Castle
No spring or well
at the ruins of Whorlton castle
grass hides their source
Medieval femme fatale
Lucia de Thweng was here
learning how to tread
De Brus ownership
of a conquered wapentake
priced in Domesday
Husbands and lovers
abusers, chivalrous knights,
eyes upon the land:
The hillsides and moors,
the gentle rolling meadows,
the pigs, cows and serfs,
The blasted stonework
of the outbuilding's remains;
fields of grazing sheep
The Day the Sun Wore My Skull
Each
day the sun wears a different shell
To
sideways scramble its migratory path
Across
the sky, mercurial in mood swings,
Today's
it found before dawn, in my bed,
A
skull of jumbled dreams to be plucked
From
the vertebrae stem, scooped clean
To
make it habitable, a nomadic shelter
To
house the spirit, to contain the light
Like
a lamp, crucible to transport flames;
Headless,
I move through vacant hours
Vaguely
distraught by the loss of thought,
Eased
by reliance on muscle memories
All
the well-learned routines and rituals,
And
set instructions on what to believe.
Expulsion
“So He drove out
the man and stationed cherubim on the east side of the Garden of Eden,
along with a
whirling sword of flame to guard the way to the tree of life.”
Leaving the forest for the animals
with their interbred adaptations,
their tokens of simplified savagery
and their disdain for our soft, furless
scaleless bodies, we took our hornlessness
and our lack of wings and buried them
in a sack of words we could never speak.
Do you even remember that first
Golgotha?
What I remember is the rain soaking my
dreads,
the taste of the soil and the Sky Spirit’s song
burning like fever-veins of molten iron
through the squamous, columnar, cuboida.
You sketched my shape on the cave wall
I wove a wave of ochre handprints.
In this new life it’s only in the flicker of firelight
that we dance naked with the ancestors
regaining shadow shells, beaks and antlers.
Evensong
Gibbous moon latched by a dream catcher
Crooning the blues over snow swaddled hills
Where towns and villages break like waves
In the curtain twitch of isolating suburbs;
The holy watchfulness of the little egret
Perched upon a bare branch over the gill
With the patience of a slaver’s statue
Its own pale smudge snagged amid debris
Going nowhere fast in the cold lunar flood
The yearly catastrophes of freeze and melt
Clogged drains gargling fresh darknesses
The waters glow with living room lamps,
She sails twilight in her threadbare shawl
The ancient parade of the not-yet-born
Between day’s demise and hatchling night
The sky is like the wide-open sea, gone quiet
Lulled at last from turbulence, laid out
Across the thickening mirk, a dropping away,
As she dips her slippered feet into skull cups
Of sleep, skips over white moors to Swainby.
Bob Beagrie has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur (The Black Light Engine Press 2020), Civil Insolencies (Smokestack 2019), Remnants written with Jane Burn (Knives, Forks & Spoons Press (2019), This Game of Strangers – written with Jane Burn (Wyrd Harvest Press 2017), Leasungspell (Smokestack 2016). His next collection When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden is due out from Stairwell Books in 2021. He lives in Middlesbrough and is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Teesside University.
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