A Preview of Gillian Prew's 'A Wound's Sound' (Oneiros Books)

 This Other Winter

 

“As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.”

(-Leo Tolstoy)

Resting this other winter on the rust muscle of my tongue

I hear all that is violent in one red sound

safe behind my own blue arm.    Where the sun comes

there is the loud dead;

a knot of dragged dogs and their blood;

the clouds reddening like cut swans.      The ruddled sides,

flashing with flies, of  bodies hauled to a swinging weight;

their wrecked eyes slamming the room of their grave.

And the air slaps violet to the wounds’ gauze,

and the gun buds bloom like sunflowers,    and as all the colours

shift to black               I hear all the good things splinter.  

A Wound’s Sound

 

Sea-sound/a wound’s sound/

the white lifting edge of the tide

 

with its hurl of blinking gulls,

wings risen like silver parachutes.

 

Stood, in the wind-sound

my ears full/my eyes as the water/

my wrapped-round arms

slipped between two hoarse gusts.

 

Slow/

the sun comes

a fetch of light.

 

A space/

 

an ambient howl-sound

 

Listen/

 

the gutted beasts.

The Sky Will Pour Open

 

Ten more summers of rain, they say.                      A defeat –

a drowning.                Dust eyelids dog roses –

the bees will come, their legs pollen-painted.

 

A roaring curtain where the sun should be           -  the birds,

quiet and stuck,

in its up-ruin.

 

            Fly,

everything. Why not?

 

The sky will pour open some days.

Pigs

 

(after Les Murray)

 

Us all on sorrow cemetery we.
Not warmed with gloss nor glutting sun
under that prize the light is tied to.
No fascist-shoehorn in our guts to make us sore
back then when world was us.
We dipped our good sides in the cool mud.
Us all free then our sung-out grunts. Bloomed/

our ballads bit the trees

and carried down the sheets of rivers.
Coughed lungs sometimes but rich with all we were.

Growing and growing/bedding our squealed litters
with sound no ticking clock/no death-knell.
Wounds sometimes from the edge of living

not blade or punch or swinging hook.
Not the bleeding screams beyond the wall.
Sliced pink our one-life/our gone-forever gifts
here where world’s flung upside down.

 'A Wound's Sound' is available from Oneiros Books, here