Gillian Prew

The Arrival of Mourning

This plug of grief, loosened,

a warm funeral. Abandoned

to the knotted waters. The blind tide

heaving and wrecked. From birth

the beckoning of cascading waste.

How the jagged skyline, sinking,

reflects the blood, whittles the air.

The arrival of mourning,

brave and black-suited,

chiming its mirror bell, shutting

the day to a leaning tomb.

Its withered eyes, like cherry stones,

lamenting their lost sweetness. I,

a blushing callous on the sideline,

singing like a shadow. Speechless.

Above the Black River

I jostled a dark thing

shadow on shadow

while a low song fell behind me

like a tumbling wound. Drifting

and useless,

            a ghosted knot

ragged from the bone’s whittle, I

drop to a silence

            water-sided

dense and benignly broken.

The rotting chime of nowhere

is a lost echo

and there are storms in my throat

such that my fingers cannot pull

or threaten with destruction.

What is this foreign night of fliers?

A black whir of crows,

the dusted carcass of a snowy swan

floating the looping line of the black river.

Poem from the Edge of Autumn

I am disappeared,

like the rain already fallen, like my neighbour

despondency. Summer, slendering

to a point untouchable; turning to a fist of fires,

a fury. Oh, the view from here. The river

spreading to the sea, the boozy backs of not-so-grand hotels.

And you, still and iridescent as an opal,

sleeping away the dusty silver of my morning. My beloved

mornings, where solitude is the silhouette of my husband,

where I am weightless for a snatched moment, where I

pluck the sun from nights full of arrows. Autumn,

your blade is my collar bone stuck out, the ridge of my pelvis,

my fingers digging in. I am not glad of you.

My Silver Lights 

From forgotten surfaces the songs; 

the winged libretto of my wedding. 

A dreaming, a hollow weight; my bones 

a finger-wilt from a spurious burial. 

Empty as birth my glass tongue,  

my confetti breath, my flowering mouth.  

 

My silver lights, 

they sway 

a foreign freedom,  

a bough over a grave.