Salt stiffened, her wings don’t lift
except pinwheeling feathers
caught helter-skelter by sea breeze,
sun bleached and lichen lined.
Watches for the hands rising,
faces breaking among shallows,
hope and desperation.
She sings for them.
Caged in her cove, she sings.
Each day there seems less of me.
Folding in on myself,
there is a sense I can crisp my edges,
find the perfect bend,
turn blemishes in and under,
tucked away out of sight.
Any tattered edges can be smoothed,
rebound into covers
tight enough to stop my spilling out.
An ache tells me that I use to spread
all these pages of myself
out across open floors and tables,
revel in how much of me there was.
When did it become a shrinking,
less is more,
best kept out of sight
and out of mind?
I can knot myself into a kaleidoscope.
Pull in every shade of my being
till I flicker out of sight,
be whole in my absence.
Still, a Muse will find my reflection
in the ripples on a lake,
a shivering blade of grass,
half a note of birdsong.
Some such poetic nonsense
always betrays me.
Reveals the stress fractures
scattering from my joints,
the places you will press into me
to dig out meanings.
To understand me you must dismantle
all the elements within these limbs
then jigsaw them into your own creation.
Redefine all the colours in the prism,
and leave none to belong to me.
These are not my grandmother’s mushrooms
their blotched white skins mottled in the grass,
a hand tucked beneath the umbrella meat,
bone handled fish knife soft to the stems.
These are a different kettle of spores altogether,
ruffed collar about a shortened stump
lips pursed on top of each other,
sour sucked expression rolled in on waves.
Extravagant, and no good to anyone
these are the dangerous sort.
This afternoon has been a delight of migraines, so I’m having a quick go at tonight’s poetics prompt and then turning in for the evening. I used to go picking mushrooms with my grandmother quite a bit, but I can’t remember why we stopped… I think they just stopped growing quite as much in the fields around her house.
The size of a lemon,
which reminds me of a fruit tree,
miniature,
leaves buttered up and green
as the unripe citruses berried in-between…
and this is much the same,
this slow uncurling as you ripen
my own belly thickening till I peel
off my layers,
test the softness around my middle,
squeeze the fruit flesh.
You feel all this apparently,
spin like a top, end over end
become a flicker in a whirlwind.
Still hidden by your smallness,
little lemon pip blooming.
I’ve missed quite a few DVersePoets night over the past couple of months, and that’s mainly been because I’ve spent all my free time napping. The little Gremlin above is due this summer, and I’ve had all the fun of pregnancy sickness to content with, so my writing took a bit of a hit. My husband and I are very excited to welcome our little human into the world, and I thought what better way to tell my poet friends the news, than with a poem for the Open Link Night!
Carol J Forrester 
You must be logged in to post a comment.