Five Poems by Geoff Sawers

Nocturne

In that darkened room where you beheld
the moon full in the mirror
I begged you not to cross between.

There is a pattern in this garden
I have heard but never seen for myself
one day we shall find the fountain at the centre.

But I am afraid. Each night I climb
to the attic window and pull back the curtain
to see the maze from above

and each night I draw my breath and look
on something I have never seen before.

The Edge of the World

Shivering, he wakes
underneath
a carpet of fading stars.

Skips down the shore
each morning
to wait for the setting sun.

Like A Bear Bent Over A Cello

It had been a long long time
and when I got down to the valley again
Spring was on the turn
each burbling stream flagged
with a splatter of iris yellow
a cormorant spread
flickering on the water
and a movement in the distance
like a hand withdrawn into shadow

Queen Takes Knight

From bread & bed & candlelight
to the peewit's lonely cry.

A buzzing forever in his ears
a few acres of foreign sky.

But the lemon on its branch is
purest gold. Don't ask why.



Queen Proserpina Speaks

'It lies in a dark secluded valley,
steep-sided and thick-mossed and few
ever penetrate that tangle, to the clear rill that runs below.

The shadows will gather like rain clouds
as you swing down from the path into that crack
carved into the land but not with human hands

and blackbirds chatter alarm as you push through. Hold on,
go down, go down, there is a holm-oak in this valley
in the deepest thick of the scrub

one branch of which glows with a pale light,
like white gold it glows, even in the dark of winter.
This branch you must bring to me,' she said, was silent, and I went.

Geoff Sawers published a lot in the early 2000s, then spent 15 years as a house-husband raising 3 children and didn't submit work anywhere, but has just begun again. He has new work forthcoming in Obsessed With Pipework, Sarasvati and Seventh Quarry. He lives in Reading.