Ways With Paper

Thursday, 15 September 2011

I too have declared war

(in memory of Salamo Arouch)

I will live and survive and answer

why I took up the fight.

Why, delegated, I fight to the death.

(Dancing away from darkness,

wrapped up tight into fists

Dancing with the flames,

boxing clever)

I will tell all the people on earth

how ghosts say farewell,

going without saying.

In my head I hear my being dance from ear to ear

You’re lost enough to find yourself, by now.

Slip down the cold chute of history

Even if there’s only the hollow wind

Even if nothing is there

At least there’ll be a draught

If there’s a fog it will clear.

The blue arches of morning will break.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion

Slowly heal like a dent in dough.

I feel everything that happened

I hear you calling in the night

And you were there, as well, a touch away

always about to pull the sound of ticking darkness back

The view is real enough

I cannot turn away

I stand like a stone - a hollow block of anguish -

facing down the vast landscape of a lament:

the valley overgrown with the words we took

that led nowhere

the tall trees of tears,

the herds of sorrow grazing

chewing fresh distractions

(everywhere the scrimmage of appetite);

and beyond them the fields of blossoming regret

shot through with Rue

When trapped history malignantly testifies luminescence and irrefutable levity

My true love and I lie without touching

skeletoned in darkness

History glimmers the firelight on faces

The yawn of time not yet arrived

Back in a time made simply by the loss of detail,

burned, dissolved, broken off

in signs we would smooth out like imprints on a bed

a crack was moving down the wall

His sad ghost would aspire, free of my love,

to its own post, free of its careful body

Not doors, but their shadows, slam in the house of the wind

I waited for someone, who came, and wasn’t what I wanted for

I kiss a bone (a relic)

I ache from slow beauty.

Monday, 15 August 2011

Poem from an 83 year old

We struggle to find a good example.

Her long-term memory remembers

Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum.

She translates the line of Virgil’s Latin,

‘We hear the horses' hooves thumping the broken earth of the plain.’

“It combines sound with a galloping rhythm

mimicking in words the sound of horses he describes.”

This – our teacher tells us – is onomatopoeia.

Monday, 8 August 2011

Stand still

The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost (David Wagoner)

Go outside, last thing.
Sit, still, on the back step.
Smoke for five lonely minutes.

Hush your incessant chatter.

Listen to the silence of the night.

Wait - for the garden to appear.

Negative spaces in the sky

- edges fogged -

whisper by moonlight.

Mantilla style lace.

The world crackles, settles, sighs.

A snail halts - barely

stirring a long neck at the refuse.

Dark earth, solitary pebble.

The undergrowth bristles, irritates, harries.

A pale cat has cleared a murky path.

Ink stained stubble, stones.

Fletched silvered spines. A hedgehog’s shadow

shifts over the rise of the lawn.

The scent of consolation rustles

out of a no longer black heaven.

Rinsed by glistening rainfall,

nostalgia hoists itself up.

Saturday, 30 July 2011

Erasure

When you go back

Unthink how the indifferent sea
Fingered with tidal persistence to rise by inches

Eased across helpless lowlands
Licked at villages, farmsteads and churches

Erased daisies, lime trees, bales of straw
Filled the throats of severed bridges

Stopped roads in mid-sentence
Discomfited mapmakers

As if by design

© Sophia Roberts
All rights reserved

Saturday, 16 July 2011

Start with a line from someone else

Dare you cuckold this line from somewhere else

to go where I have never been?

Can you promise to love, honour, cherish,

forsake it for no other?

Can you countenance fidelity

until you are parted by death?

Can you envisage obedience

in return for all its worldly goods?

Dare you muster courage to love this line deeply

with a faithful heart?

Thursday, 7 July 2011

A Singular Recipe for a Just Desert (in fifty words)

Cast salt over one shoulder.

Truss the bastard bird. Boil him

with a worn thumb, a fat worm

and the loose tooth of a horse

Wring in the juice of one lemon.

Simper till it come to a high past

that will not cleave. ‘Till it be enough.

Serve cold.

A Singular Recipe for a Just Desert (the Earl of Arundel’s way)

Let your gut have lain in vinegar and brown paper half a day before you use it

Cast salt over one shoulder.

Well fricate and oil a calves’ cauldron.

Strike two tears to make fire.

Warm the horn of one devil ‘till hot.

Truss the bastard bird

and boil him by himself in fair water.

Put to him a worn thumb, a fat worm

the loose tooth of a horse and a peck of pepper.

Wring in the juice of half a Lemon.

Simper for three hours

till it come to a high past

that will not cleave.

‘Till it be enough.

Have a leer made for it.

When it is cold

pour away the black liquor that comes from it.

Take out the heart and dispose in seething water.

Mince or chop the flesh into little bits

- as small as grated bread - with half a pound of marrow.

(Be sure none of your lemon kernels be among your pie-meat).

With your hands stiff

work altogether like a pudding.

Divide the flesh up into forty pieces

as big as walnuts.

Toss them one or twice.

Put them into the gut.

Stand in a deep coffin

with fried garlic stuck upright lying on the walls.

Let it stay there a day and a night.

Take it out and open it.

Sauce with bitter moonshine

Serve your pie without a cover

Revenge is a dish

best served cold