By JOHANNA HIGGINS
.
Dead Poetry.
Aye.
Reaching down
You have plucked the very
Marrow
Out.
Down
Within the narrow stardom of the curve
Within. You turned and split.
Not only the coolness of breath,
But the fluid fall of sleep now
Lies uneven against the mist.
That was a look, a gentle movement.
“Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—” (T S Eliot)
A fragment….
Burn, burn without,
And yet the frost is sleet.
As is the whitening pelt of pain, that
Coverlet of sleep.
Bleak, bleak the images that flare and die,
That tremble in on wasted feet to stare and cry.
♦
Little Russia.
Speeding to Archangel,
The glassy edge of time
Nailed down love in a split
Beat.
The peasant women wore scarves of woollen
Mix and, shawled, they warned of unleavened
Times ahead.
It could be that this way the port is never reached and
Time demands we sail
Before
Arrival.
Fiat.
Snow heaps upon the blessed
And upon the dammed.
♦
The Angle of Grace.
The angle of grace lies in-between
The marching timeliness of sounds
And space.
The laying of a cloth and place,
In contrast with his eyes, a face.
In something like mathematical division teaming into
Time.
The indefinite article before derision.
Between reflection’s interface and water.
Diagonal into wind and
Leaning never against the rest of the rain,
And leaning,
And ever blown by the crying gale.
♦
Ave.
Kinsmen,
Two in death bestow
Honour.
Grave by grave the
Deadly entwines of
Bones
List
to the heart,
Flesh of flesh.
Kindred kindred est.
When did life flash and
Dying grip grasp?
How nerve fought –
And thought in thinking fled.
How grassed we are now,
How deep embedded in burial breath.
Rock on rock in life to death.
♦
Johanna Higgins was selected for inclusion in the Best New British and Irish Poets Anthology 2020 to be published by Eyewear Press. She is currently working on her first anthology of poetry, The Etymology of Think. She is a lawyer who investigates miscarriages of justice as a Commissioner for the Criminal Cases Review Commission and is a member of the Royal Historical Society. She had a Cumbrian childhood but now lives in Ireland with her family. See also our archive for Johanna Higgins.
