Poems by Jenny Fothergill
Insomnia
Back to 4am.
It’s been a while.
Stars burn through
fierce white light,
an alpine sky.
The night is a sentry.
The unloved dogs howl skyward.
We live in a world we have created
but we cannot understand.
There is blood on my hands
and an ache
to return to my mother.
To clothe myself in wolf skins
and feel real hunger.
To sleep under stars, where
fires burn through
in a forest of black pine -
and ice melt.
But that forest does not exist anymore.
We live in a world we have created
but we cannot understand.
There is no ice left to melt.
The rivers run dry.
The black pine is dissected. Lobotomised.
We speak in low whispers, smoke signals
Of distress. Of deliverance. Shoulder
This changing. This panic.
This ambivalence.
Cairn
Wisdom
sits in places
and need not speak.
Years,
and truth weigh
down the granite.
Come the few,
not yet
jaded by the world’s
sharp cries,
to climb a while,
and listen.
Villages
descending without haste
two creels strung awkward
over brittle shoulders;
heel, toe, the pier again.
the sketch of our grandfathers
and other dead men.
hailing the sea-hush cries
of an emptying town
white washed walls
and quarry dust, wind
chimes replace the
songs of children.
watch offspring take desk jobs in the city,
forget to visit. 4 x 4’ s
for status, golf clubs for sport.
all the same
the widower prays
they find their peace
out there
in the violent world.
quiet peace
like sea birds
at dawn break,
the simple peace
of a free man
whistling,
until the wind returns.
A Life
look west, to the direction
of a life. the minds slow tug,
the inland chicane
of the wind revolving out to sea
and back again, the omnipotent haulage of
steel rope and starlight. the constellations
of a life.
a lone telegraph pole, thread of slate
and grey wool, clouds departed from their origins,
abandon and cold. unobserved timetables,
and religion. laughter in lightness, grief
in isolation. look west: towards time
diffused, reams of silver harvested
from the sky. the islands, like sleeping men lie
perennial, on an ever changing light box.
look west, to the
flicker
of grandparent, black
cormorant and child-unborn,
to the direction of
a life.
Selkie
and so we carry an ocean in our rib- cage
and the great emptiness that fills us
is power akin to God.
She tells us she is lonely.
and so we sail a course of desperate intuition,
and the winds splinter like condemnation,
to wash us up face down on foreign shores.
And so she is waiting.
we too now, are waiting.
and the silence is the silence of the unborn.
we stand before her, palms outstretched
not yet ready to surrender.
for within these great caverns course
the systole and diastole of tidal races
of sand
and oil
and blood
and so
and so
and so
the breathing is behind us, the long journey-
moonlit skin, touching God
on the black shingle beach.
She takes our passports.
and so some nights when we look to the stars
pockets in a long black sky, we still imagine the lives
of our mothers, and our children
but more often we’ve dreamt of roads
not graves, beneath the many silver waves
that might somehow lead us
home.
Mother
Out in the world
a mother dies
and her unborn child becomes the waves.
Howling to the night, crashing against the darkening sky.
WE CRY
We drown compassion
in rubber boats
and watch children’s bodies float
ashore.
The Kurdish family murdered by the state
But we call it immigration policy
But we call it national security
Tell me
O wind, O waves
O little murderess
dressed in pearls-
nursing the hostile environment
like a stepmothers’ blessing;
Who are the terrorists now?
The Home Office
The slim black box, child-size
declared it was too late
for weeping.
We had reached
the limits of our sympathy.
Meticulous, we counted them
like bacalao. 27. Slipped roughly in
to freezer bags, spoiled too soon.
We exercised our conscience
by assuring the public it was
indeed, a terrible shame.
The by-catch of Our Borders, no blame
to slice our skins tonight.
The minister no longer
stopping to patronise their passage,
merely scuffing them under the heel
of his thick steel boot,
a final confession,
in passing.
Elements
Sarcasm binds our people, in the absence of sunshine or wealth.
Slowing hands, shoulders squint, lungs cough up
traces of tobacco, salt, fool’s gold lodged in slate, still.
Aye, we are a queer folk. A fickle, knuckled,
feisty and timid bunch. Weary to the pulse of tide
and timetable; lives that ebb, flood and spring
beneath weather-roughened kindness.
Hurtling from elbow to cheek
of another a- political dance floor,
across the varnish of fiddles, ten hundred eyes.
Have you seen, the world is softening from the outside?
Meanwhile inside, people are dying in living rooms.
Cigarette halos pierce the carpet: rosary beads hang the wall.
The light has long faded west as a grey heron shrieks seaward,
The colours of resilience; a chill wind, weeping softly of forgiveness.