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Friday 21 December 2012

Gillian Prew


The Missing

Never widow, just ruin in bone
in covers of black air,
of flung dust
a dark burst from the gone tongue.
 
The dressed wilt of these fuchsia breaths
weaved away thin from the turning lungs.
 
Living a long, bitten shadow,
fixing the eye to the anchored flower
 
petals of dry light whispering.


No God
 
I was born into the wrong fields. They stuttered
with ever-goldening, the black pulse of growth,
and I played right into their forest skirts
full of bluebells and night time. My house was
smoke and separation,
and lying still with booming ears. I read
until my eyes hung out and the walls softened,
my solitude gusting like a loom-gale.
I styled the damaged bone that held me up,
the ruined blood, the mouth of memories
until my mirror showed a girl ghost           glad
and I did not even imagine happiness then.
 
*
And now the rain comes like confetti
worn from too much wishing, too much
imagining a dress, and my insides remarking on it. A dress
with faithful skirts full of bluebells and night time
where no god ever was.


The Dying Season (for Milo)
 
Pink mouths
the fuchsias have fallen           open and glad
their plucked tongues fanned still on the wintering stone.
 
            And I,
tumbling upon them
with my day-heart and my needle lip
            ruffling them to wreathes.
 
            No griefs
in the quickening turn             the run of things
the birds fenced in by fog and wind
            the browning days
the dug-in sun.
 
            The dying season.       And the rain comes
loud as a twinning sound
                      pooling in the dents that absence has left.

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