Poems by Moor Poets
This page features two or three poems by members of Moor Poets. New poems will be posted at regular intervals. If you would like to be included, please send one or two of your published poems to Helen Boyles.
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Gertrude by Alice
I knew she was a genius; she did too. You could tell it from the way she sat there, thinking thoughts that were more thought thoughts than the thoughts that other people thought. My thought was that she was beautiful, majestic. I fell headlong into those warm dark eyes. When she asked me to be her wife I cried for days. Being a genius she didn’t cook or sew or grow the vegetables or see to the house. I did everything for her, my husband-mother-child. When she wrote down those thoughts she thought I typed them – the typewriter made her scared – and told the publishers how wonderful they were so she would have more thoughts. She was a genius. She talked to people always, people I never liked coming into our house, taking her from me. I spoke only to wives; the kitchen was our place, the altar where for her I sacrificed chickens or ducks, made her sauces from wine and devotion. I kept her fat to cherish me, thin as her shadow. And in bed (maybe I shouldn’t mention it) she was a genius too. If she was here she’d tell you more, much more about our life. Forty years it was, of thoughts and books and fun. Her laugh was bigger than us both, her words the melody that sang us through the day. Without her I’m thinner than I ever was living these days on memory and cigarettes. I may have said this to you before: she was a genius. Susan Jordan Published in A House of Empty Rooms, Indigo Dreams 2017 On the day I didn’t know The street was quiet on the day I didn’t know. Pigeons went about their business along the windowsills, the high street just as steep, the river on its way below, the sun hidden, then re-emerging to soften the early chill. On the day I didn’t know, I dawdled on the hill – I couldn’t up the pace, lift myself, the usual shops held no interest. Too much time to kill. A busker sang a baleful tune, I didn’t stop to hear his reason for the day. I reached the top of town and found a place to buy a drink, a compromise to help me home and swap my dullness for reward, anything so as not to think. On the day I didn’t know, at home I locked the door. I emptied ashtrays, fed the cat, and mopped the floor. Julie-ann Rowell |
Beauty and the Killing Machine
(Avro Vulcan Nuclear Bomber Dawlish Airshow, August, 2015) There is no 4-minute warning but a thin preamble whine and a huff of agitated air like a squall in far-off trees. No wrath of gods, not yet but a delta moth sidling into this piece of sky insouciant, a ghosting silver thing of inconsiderate beauty. And the thousands on the beach whoop and cheer at a circus elephant in ballet shoes a whispering dinosaur, a kindly giant’s trinket trundling in. There is just time to admire the brazen gape of bomb-bay doors before the blacksmith’s hammer falls and a man-made lightning bolt of noise cracks the atoms of the air. And in the quake an old and shaky black and white: a perfect puffball mushroom cloud of inconsiderate beauty. Ian Chamberlain First to blink And on the rain-slick road in front of me white-staring staring me down daring me down not moving luminous in the moment in the car headlight forty-mile-an-hour moment flower-face feather-face saucer-starer Blodeuwedd taking me in taking my lethal metal jacket in and not moving facing me down claw gripping carcase pinning me down till I blink brake swerve into the risk of oncoming lifts upward like a leaf letting go of gravity curd of mist of white ash dissolving to night to drizzle blurring to peripheral talons ungrasped letting me run leaving me smeared furred and bloody on the road Jennie Osborne Winner of the Kent and SussexPoetry Competition in 2015 published in Colouring Outside the Lines Oversteps Books, 2015. |
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