With thanks to the judge and editors of the Norwich Writers' Circle 2010 Open Poetry Competition Anthology
The Falling Man
Air is liquid. This surprises me.
I thought – if I’d thought – that
it would be featureless, but still
it parts in its liquidity.
The thinness of the air
stops my breath. If I’d thought,
I would never have done this.
At first, the air was buoyant,
it held me – poised – so I could
see ants in pure, feral panic in
the carefully-ordered checkerboard
streets below me: chaos was never
meant to be here. Air is all I know.
Our relationship is brittle. Essential.
The Brazen-ness of Bones
How could it be so brazen, this thing
that took an age and a crying to be here.
The first one, pearlescent in its pink bed,
has always been brazen, with its
white soldier cousins, milk-soft and
upstanding in their fallible regiment.
I nurtured them, these tyrants, feeding
them ambrosia and bones and blessed air,
and they came in their legions, each one
with a fever and a raw, dank breath from
an earthy cave. The cathedral-vaulted nave
welcomed them for a week, a month, a year,
herringboned redly around them and choired
by a thin, reedy whine. Now it stands
on the red cliff’s edge: its successor
making a coup: bloodless and cold.
It Seemed to Rain
It seemed to rain then – always
the aftertaste of the night before and you,
with your stone saint’s face, pale and
Arctic-eyed, waiting for me to break.
Your beauty betrays you – there is
scant kindness in your arsenal, no pity
for the battle-scarred as you stare: your
iron composure. My shoes soak water
as I stand, clown-like, dishevelled by your
gaze, your steady, bore-hole gaze that
makes me naked and stupid. Inconsequential
strata washed away by the relentless force
of your scrutiny. The wide park soaks its
muddy face in rain and faltering birdsong.
This madness says you have the power to
stop the Earth and ease it from its axis.
