Thursday 25 August 2016

Julie Sampson: For those who say there are no more poems


        i

Look at these swallows
swooping –
the intoxication of loops –
and under
blue

headlong

dives
over butterfly-skims above
the whites of this green gold field

It's easy to miss them –
they sail close to the wind –
to misunderstand the
turn of their phrase,
the twisted spell of their
secret code

and what can you say
of the white under-belly flash
silking those exquisite plaits
of wheat?

        ii

Tell them how it was
for us
not so long ago
in a world where
there were no ... 
mobile phones [phone-home home-phone
Phone

Home]

MP3s
MP4s
Ninetendos
You-tubes
i-tunes
Face-books
Smart phones no
Phone-home
Home-phone
Home ... 

where home was a place
not a meeting-site
in virtual space ... 

Phone ...

        iii

It's calm tonight
we're floating on a sea a wheat-green
gold
alchemy
each stalk waving a soul from
Underworlds where fallow deer
swim a
fox prowls
and you imagine you can see
the baiji dolphin –
even re-imagine
Persephone – 

You wonder what
she is doing
the schedule she set with
her mother and Hadeian
Underground lover
has, after all been going on
for quite a while

(and earth is still going round)

No she's probably having
a hedonistic time – out of it
on ecstasy –
and forgotten long ago
what she came back for
or got bored enticing
those poor souls beneath

She's obviously content
with her lot – lover
keeps her happy, doesn't
need her dose of sun
and sky –
or, she's fed up being
a tool between Mother
and lover not wanting anymore
to do their dirty work

She'll drowse in the home
of her deep earth-bed
heady with day-dream
sleep and idylls of night
on bedded rock
for another 2000 years –
so many poems will enter
her head only
fragments
seep up to ground as
white-wheat seeds –
they'll pick them up with flints

until mother and lover
resolve their differences

        iv

Today I watched the swallows
violet-black their
midday
swoop
over shadow and field

and a white belly uplift
to the perch on phone-lines and on to heaven
through broken
skies – (they're after all
above it all a hieroglyphic
sign from God)

        v

... where Home was not
a place in space

and poet was
a Poet


From Tessatura (2013). Too sprawling a lament, with its emotions untrammeled and thereby losing the force of focus; but nonetheless an anguished statement of true loss that links poet and reader.

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