Description

This blog contains book reviews, comments on interesting things and a smattering of self promotion. Enjoy.


Saturday 22 September 2012

Failing to See the Perseids

I haven't put any poetry online since the days of Myspace and cringeworthy teenage doggerel, but I had some advice on this one, so I thought my assistants deserved to see the finished product. Here it is:

Failing to See the Perseids

1

Mist drowns out the houses and the sky,
pink from the glow of a bronze medal moon
or streaked with orange where the street lamps
mark the road. Somewhere behind the curtain,

Dust, hung on the void since man first stood,
is pulled like loose thread by proximity
to an Earth which plummets round the sun
at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour.

On impact with the air, it lights momently
- for half a second it competes with stars -
then disapears, reduced at last to atoms,
falling, silent as a martyr's tears.

2

Do you recall the fellow traveller:
that long haired star which stalked the sky
when I was eight and you were six
and we had not yet met?

Outside my mother's church, I saw it
in the pagan dark of April,
a messenger, a stranger moon
from a time before reason;

A nomad cast adrift upon
this vast machine of fire and rock,
a prophet of the awefulness
of distance without end.

1 comment:

  1. I feel you. I dont understand it and yet I do. Indeed, this is poetry.

    ReplyDelete