Four Sublime Poems by Bob Beagrie

Invertebrates

on the day my feet were sea slugs

they shuffled through soft carpets

of silt

on hard bedrock disturbing

billows of sand and grit

muddying the waters,

sensitive groping vulnerable

boneless in the

darkness

clinging on, resisting the tug

of tides     currents     commitments

seeking out buried things

the long sunk, the forgotten

antennae warily checking

for predators,

shifting in colour

to communicate silently

with one another

in a life of touch and texture

they curled their tentacles

over the lip of a crevasse

reached for drifting plankton

recoiled as they sensed

the vibrations

of unknown

tremors                        froze

until the danger passed

they were the long beginning

in the deep before

I dreamed myself human 

 

Kite Over the Castle

 

Swallows are reaping harvests of midges

and water boatmen from the loch's hide,

sending ripples scudding, breaking mirror

images of trees on the turn, the jutting,

gnarled stone of the ruin standing roofless

hollowed, its seat of power long sunk,

swallowed up by sod while a red kite circles

effortlessly riding air streams of this end

of August evening, scouring the scrub

for any sign of supper, its largo

waltz about the sky, over the great hall,

the high-pitched whistle resounds off hillsides

rings inside abandoned sheep skulls,

carries, like bloodlines, across centuries.

 

Ripples

This river minds winter sky

moving into banks of fog,

floating logs, leaves, twigs

stitch brief patches of blue;

 

upstream the perspectives

blend into a general idea

of beginnings, a first step

out of the primordial soup,

the damp woods scribble

themselves onto the water

after I've watched you cut

from the tree two sprigs

 

of dark holly for our home

I catch my face in the pool

as we cross the footbridge,

flickering in the river's mind. 

 

Reaches

 

The measured glint of an enamel jug on the topmost shelf,

the stretch of tide-damp sand where the track runs out,

the lone tree by the moorland road holding heather to cloud;

but I cannot hold onto numbers, fumbling their shapes,

as if I’m playing a game of blind man’s bluff with sundried clay,

these crumbling figurines refuse neat combinations:

 

my hand cupping moonlight like a vintage half-crown

offering it as a gift before it slips through my fingers,

before it’s dropped into a slot in the mountainside,

I address my grandfather’s hand rising from the sheet

like the wing of a pale moth but our timing is off so,

it settles without the brush of a last touch.

 

The spit of an ember from his open fire - the freckle it makes

in the rug, its tail of smoke, a pang of guilt picked like a spot,

holding arms out to catch the muscle memory of a child.

 

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.