ASSENT
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From Vol 64/3
Selected by Derrick Buttress
NEEDLEWORK
Five iron objects
Adam brought from Paradise:
an anvil, tongs, two hammers,
and for Eve, a needle.
Already she owned wood and fishbone,
then silver, ivory and bronze,
till Toledo and Damascus armed women with steel.
I’m no Victorian daughter
trudging a sampler’s ridge and furrow,
nor Sami,
cold-blunted fingers racing snow
to fasten stiff tepee-hides;
no coifed and candlelit nun
sliding seed-pearls down silk to fleece a Lamb of God.
I’m not a Navajo girl,
flying fine sinews through worked skins
on a bird’s slender wing-bone -
two dresses for my wedding, one to wear
one to carry, knowing it will be my shroud.
My need’s for
a thread-and-fabric rhythm
older than ploughing, reaping:
for a belonging
among those who know
only our own spit cleans off the blood-spots -
the sisterhood of the pricked finger.
Emmaline O’Dowd
.
PENRHYS AT DUSK
This is all a beautiful lie,
for you cannot see the isolation hospital
(a ruin now) where Edward Thomas, ten,
died of meningitis.
Nor
the erased pit-head workings
where many good men, deep
in the underground, anthracite labyrinths,
were buried for the owner’s dice.
Those starlings, rising like a last chorus,
have no sounds to match Penderyn
or Treorchy choirs, singing still
of those things only music,
in its unsanctioned epiphanies,
can remind us of; where love songs
were cut short, sermons hastily re-written
for a week-day of Sundays.
Look back, eyes closed, and you will see,
as a boy, those dour men
make their way home to another reprieve,
not knowing when the next day would not happen.
Huw Watkins
.
ORDER
Every night before you sleep you try to put your life
in order, though it’s not the tidy house, the balanced hours
or friendships kept in bright repair that keeps you thinking.
It’s this prayer to a god of sequence who holds each kite
of memory on the line. The wind forgets the shapes
of elms – and see how this once shining string frays
and turns to cloud. Did you that first time in Spain
awake in a blue-hrey room fragrant with oranges,
a thin white curtain to blur the sun – though light waxed
upon the window sill? And was this before the wave
that licked the sandcastle off the beach? And when
were those olive shadows and the scents of evening?
So hard to rank the trembling days and say which colours
are the liars or name the blue that holds a silver plane
pinned like a brooch to a wayward sky. A trail of white
flowers fades into water, creates a sadness we never
knew. The lips moving, the fingers telling, as if they
could make a story out of it. Snap out the light.
In the dark, they’ll come sharper – the cherished instants
clear and true? And to think again of the hand you held,
as if you loved not once but twice! Night! Though
there’s a gleam behind the eye, a tiny figure skating,
a last joy, skilled in the arts of turning, on black Ice.
Charles Wilkinson
