Teesta Review:
A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 1. May 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
A City in
His Pocket
Searched his donkey jacket,
business suit and blazer.
Nowhere. In his dreams hand
in pocket it felt smooth like wet cobbles
his hobnail boots slipped on and faltered,
clattered and echoed in a cave of streets,
crammed with bread on the bake,
spicy curry and sweet dark chocolate,
or the top of a Christmas dome
you upturned to see snow fall
on gothic spires and picket fences,
or hand in pocket spiky and harsh
like police speed traps or his wife's voice.
Pick pocketed now empty pocket.
Gust blew across the abandoned threads.
Aha! He'd put it in his hi viz jacket.
Let Me
Pass Through
city walls
that bind all your threads together,
walk through this wood,
let your cityself take same walk, see
buildings as lone trees,
homeless hostel
is an oak, butchers
a willow that bends
down over the stream
where jammed traffic swims.
A dead bird breathes
animated by flies
is a man in the corner who sings
the blues to passers.
That fall of a leaf
tickertape homecoming parade.
Your pavement footfall
echoes in my forest.
The
Bridge And The Birds
First Saturday together
with your son at Bradford Museum of Film and
Photography.
The bridge radiated
its structural pains
as the train ran over its spine.
I struggled to explain
to ten-year old Ben
why these shimmering lines of stress changed
with the altering weight
of the locomotives passage.
You urged your son to listen to me,
as you had urged him not to talk to strangers,
I was a stranger to him.
Behind its glass the train went nowhere, but
out and back
across the same bridge
showing its structural pains
through special lens
to each curious onlooker.
The special lens of our eyes looking out the
Museum window.
We wondered at the massed flight of birds
dipping and arching
over the city as the sun faded.
Ben shifted from foot to foot
as I held your hand.
Ben drummed his fingers as I smelt your hair,
moving your body closer to mine.
Each bird adapting the air
under Its wings
as its partner adapted the same;
a swarm of grey specks.
We looked tor ages
through our lens
Ben asked why they moved like that.
The birds went nowhere
but out and back
across the same city.
Ben was a stranger to them.
I Rake Up
trees sloughed curled flakes
of skin that crinkle and break
into dust.
Scales of trees fall away
while lizard bodied bark
hardens a sleep inside.
I take up the scales,
weigh the worth of a trees disguise.
Each leaf a city map
of what once was.