The Loss

Dismay & grief contend
for room. The upper hand
is gained at first by grief;
this much I understand.

It has colour & a shape
familiar to the eye.
The taste is sharp: the earth
breaks open; grief says cry.

Grief is for something lost,

a place where someone stood.

Its dimensions are the same

as the vanished good.

Out of it may come
a thought, a fresh resolve;
endured & done with,
it allows for love.

But the future, not the past
is the dominion of dismay.
In this bleak emporium
nothing is on display.

Just vacant shelves & long
cold sweating floors.
Nothing belongs, nothing
fits. Are there no doors?

If it were grand, heroic,
demanding an attitude,
I could be decent or brave,
make choices, stand unbowed;

but dismay is private,
unpromising & small:
things that have gone badly;
a face turned to the wall.

All you might notice –
no origin, nor sound –
is something darkish, bruised,
spreading underground.

Can you be accompanied
in this unquiet domain?
I think not. Its nature,
uneasy, not quite pain,

is only made for one.
And almost as relief
I would embrace the clean
exigencies of grief

Beatrice Garland

Tchaikovsky

39B: Brothers

Fall

The woods decay, the woods decay & fall.
The baby hurls his breakfast at the wall.
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.
The burthen hits the lino with a sound
like porridge plopping on the tabletop.
The baby’s name is Cain. He ought to stop.
Stop breathing. Now. Before he’s got his teeth.
Man comes & tills the field & lies beneath.
Especially a man whose name is Abel.
Who now, aged two, is underneath the table,
playing the keeper of his plastic sheep.
The baby drivels & the vapours weep.
Time does what it is good at & goes on,
and after many a summer dies the swan.
Eating. Sleeping. Eating. Sleeping. Eating.
Repeating & repeating & repeating.
The happy eater is his brother’s keeper.
The happy eater’s not his brother’s keeper.
Discuss. Meanwhile, another supper’s hurled
here at the quiet limit of the world.
The pudgy killer gains another pound.
The vapours seep their burthen to the ground.

Michael Hulse

38B: Sun-birds at Seria

In wicker chairs with whiskeys in their paws
The ex-patriates sit. Less savage than it seems,
The sun, obedient of its natural laws,
Shines on their talk of tax-avoidance schemes.

Out on the lawn hibiscus-branches sway
As sun-birds, balanced on the flower-heads,
Peck through the petals, find an unnatural way
To get at what they want. Their hunger shreds
The flimsy scarlet of the flowers’ bloom
But does not, as the patient insects do,
Re-pay with pollination.
I presume
Somehow it all works out. The taxes too

Graeme Wilson

37B: Politically Incorrect Caucasian

M’lud
I’m sure they were
Caucasian. I saw
quite clearly. They all had snow
on their boots

Raymond Tong

36B: Right

Flowers are right at marriages & funerals.
They speak as tongues cannot
as, round the altar, clumped in graveyards,
we take root.

Their colours flare, unauthored & unearthly.
They sing out, preach no text,
not even this, that something blessed
has gone past

Yet it was live, warm, human hands that picked them,
women’s eyed, no doubt, who saw
what must go where, what might be tendered
to the law

William Scammell

35B: The Smile

What woke you from the sleep within my sleep
Through which, so the dream demanded, I had to keep
Vigil, obscurely troubled? What touched your mouth
Stirring lips slumber still numbed apart
Until – my children’s changeling, unbidden child –
Slowly & half yawningly you smiled
Splashing love like water in a time of drought
Back from the ripples of your drowsing into my heart?
Questions now it is morning I dare not ask,
Nor how such memories hollow such dry loss
Before they are forgotten. Against the house,
Stripping the magnolia flask by bruised mauve flask,
Wind flings the rain’s bunched iron filings. You smiled
And I was consumed for a moment, consumed & held

David Hartnett