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Sunday 22 June 2014

Gillian Prew

from 'The Black Stanzas'
 
 
(xiv) blossom/loss
 
Her breasts      sunk-in    orbit once
her grief a blossom/ her           green/     
her launch of fists                   loss.           
Her heart/her diamond       
all blacked-in.    
One memory less than a dragged-out dream.   
Her heavy threads/
                        her winter legs.
 
 
(xv) teeth of swans/swathes of tides
 
Lipped, the black water
with its teeth of swans. Salt-mouth
and its swathes of tides/black tides
lapping the land -  
the skin of the land/
darkening the detail of its tattoo.
 
 
(xvi) grey wind/sweet shadow
 
Ghost-sounds/a grey wind’s journey
through the trees.      
A blackbird’s
sweet shadow of a song/
its beautiful black language
                                wild in the air.    
           
 
(xvii) proud blood/black cloud
 
Grief, mirror-deep/
                          twinned.
Proud blood of mother and child/
the heave-to of death.
A hole for a throat
full of ribbons and idle creatures/full
of black cloud and leaves.
      A calf with its heart cut out/
everything stained with milk.
 
 
(xviii) buried/bleeding
 
When not weeping
             and orange with sunlife
poppy
full-out like a flame,
black buried throat and sorrow-seed,
gulps upward the bleeding light.
Wound-worried
the earth beneath holds on
to all her buttercups and dust.

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