Three Poems by Emily Tee

 

A Turning of Seasons

 

            after Tom Hennan's “In The Late Season”

 

Have you looked at lines

until they become a box, a house?

Petroglyphs of stick figures,

become men, women, deer, coyotes.

Cartoon sun, moon, stars

resolve to a map, a calendar.

Someone lived their life by them,

the hunting, planting, harvesting.

Marks meant magic – and knowledge.

They felt the same rock vibrations,

the heat leached into it from the sun,

the heartbeat of the seasons passing.

Like a snatch of lost language

heard in folk tales something calls to us.

Millennia, aeons pass.

The stars are the same.

Deep down,we're the same,

still seeking knowledge

and magic.

 

Prayer in the shadow of the serpent's slither 

 

    After John Slaby's artwork "The Serpent" 

 

Flickering screens let the world in

    all the wickedness, hate and sin

 

Big Cup, burger, pill bottle spills

   medicines for every ill

 

Fifth of cheap booze, Jesus statue, candle

   a prayer for everything I can't handle

 

Ashtray filled with stubbed out butts

   Venus statue slashed with cuts

 

Old take-out cartons, half full wine glass,

   hope that my bad thoughts will pass

 

Visualise and manifest

   try to conjure up the best

 

Photos, postcards, old iPhone

    why do I still feel so alone? 

 

 

Sometimes it travels at night with the snowfall

 

            a cento after Mary Oliver

 

this morning again it was in the dusty pines

a certain sharpness in the morning air

a bitterness, acid

 

October, first snow entering the kingdom

lonely white fields

the night traveller

the black snake sleeping in the forest

 

some questions you might ask a visitor,

little owl who lives in the orchard,

maybe one or two things

 

when death comes

white owl flies into and out of the field

crossing the swamp, the river Styx

 

happiness, a dream of trees

morning in a new land on winter's margin 

 

Source: this cento uses the titles of poems by Mary Oliver in "Mary Oliver: New and Selected Poems Volume 1" (Beacon Press, 1992).

Emily Tee is a writer living in the UK Midlands.  Her poems and flash fiction have appeared in a variety of places online and in print, including recent work in The Poetry Lighthouse, The Hooghly Review, Gypsophila Zine and the Lines of Communication Anthology by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press.