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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.
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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