Five Poems by George Sandifer-Smith

 

Brutal jacket

After ‘The Chair’ by Paul Simonon

 

With the café in my teeth,

nostrils full of petrol. Breeze

flung over my shoulder

until inertia – the chiropractor

 

visits - beer belly, film over

photographs of street parades. Wheels stuck

by the clock careening

over black ice on the Preston Northern

 

Bypass. Now the leather’s enshrined

in skeletal cracks, lucky helmet,

eyes of moisture trapped in finish

make this kitchen chair a museum. 

 

 

Bull in absence

After ‘Study of a Bull’ by Francis Bacon

 

If we were to laze into the absence     unpainted

white that might be Heaven    we'd draw death

out of the oil, dust. Madrid would solidify

this view. The strength of leaving, escape

 

without battle. Realism grips its ugly arms

around the beast – surely the dark is the pen?

Blood is about to spill             no triumph;

execution awaits, even as the stadium remains

 

unfinished. See the seating barely penciled,

perspective unhappy to assemble. Roaring

ghost crowd only lives in the matted fur,

the bright horn caught in light. One particle

 

burning on the sand,

a smear kicked up by a hoof.

 

 

Action

 

To hope is an action, less passive

than we’d let on. Prayer needs you

to dedicate time. Perhaps knees, give

up your eyelids to creases. Hope needs

 

your blood vessels to spider the ivory

of an eyeball. The crack of fingers held

together in a cross. Palms imprinted

with beads or bark of the dead apple tree

 

in the garden while dry leaves bite

into your bare feet one afternoon.

Your lungs fumigate with hope, cells

toxify, you cough and hack and hope. 

 

 

Solstice Burial

For John

 

Art here is not megalithic – declaration

that plague is hoax, cure is the trace.

Patience holds our hours glassy, a fever

of freedom a boot above a sandcastle.

 

At Newgrange dawn struggles to draw

its gold map to the day we finish half

of another journey out of the dark.

The silent stars go by – masks of cloud

 

deaden their image.

Hold each other

in pixel-light – tombs are

for the dead, not the living. 

 

 

Holy Island, North Bristol Channel

 

Bones in Ogof-yr-Ychen remind us there was Time

before the Middle of Time, when knots made crosses

ever more complex. When the Lord of the Cemais could

give his mother an island that would soak in spirit.

 

Daughtered to Dogmael. The jellyfish don’t measure

time here, where gods come and go and robes have

always fluttered, salted in the bay breeze. Older

Priory lasted until Henry VIII demanded it didn’t but

 

the Abbey stands. Red tiles and – what's a battlement

for places without battle? Crenellation to crenellation

to constellation on a good night, contemplation willed

here. Explore the mile by mile and a half, Calvary

 

in reconstruction may find you. The current unsilent order

brew fudge sweet and creamy as the day remembered

after a birthday. Verse is not enough – you must see

the Holy Island become two at high tide.

George Sandifer-Smith is a Welsh writer. His poetry has appeared in various journals and magazines including Poetry Wales, Ayaskala Magazine, The Stockholm Review, New Welsh Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, and Wet Grain, as well as numerous anthologies including Poems from Pembrokeshire (Seren Books, 2019), Hit Points (Broken Sleep Books, 2021), and Dark Confessions (Black Bough, 2021). His debut collection Nights Travel At The Right Speed will be published in late 2021 by Infinity Books UK, with pamphlet Empty Trains – a response to the Covid-19 pandemic – following in 2022, published by Broken Sleep Books.