SixPoets

Victoria Lawless

I've been writing poetry for ten years.  I envy the drive and diligence of writers who sit at their desks every day and just get on with it.  I have always written in fits and starts.  A deadline helps - I did a part time MA in Writing Studies partly because it demanded some consistancy.

Many of the characters who reside in my poems are dark or strange.  I'm preoccupied with the edges of places and the things and people that end up there.  I'm interested in animism, consequently, some of my poems have unusual narrators.  Socrates said that 'the unexamined life is not worth living.'  I agree - most of my work is autobiographical.

I am currently working on a sequence of poems inspired by a holiday in Goa.


Estuary

i Tips

Pick your way through
a rattle of salt-scrubbed bones,
know the voodoo of the shoreline.

Sidestep a sheep, its halo of flies,
skip the shattered fan of broken seagull.

Try not to dwell on the black cat
with the glassy eye and ratty velvet collar.

Develop dark humour,
an interest in biology.

You could try watching
silvered mist collect like breath
above the beating pulse of water.

ii Acoustics

You can hear the tide turn –
grinding salt, biting sand,
an acid tongue lashing channels
to ragged edges.

As the moon fattens,
it drags lisping surf
over crab-jewelled mud-flats.

When waves have stormed
the body of the river,
there is a soft gasp

as water sidles over drowning marsh.

 

iii Driftwood

It's like walking on bones –
the snap and crackle of sticks

spat like toothpicks
from the mouth of the river.

Timber splits and bleaches
among tattered asters, the skeletons of firs.

What we can't carry we drag
to the ring of stones.
We have come to make fire.

iv Bonfire

We have burnt a hole in the dark,
fuelled by the rage of a lost forest -

spitting elm, hissing beech,
the bright fury of holly.

When finally the oak
loses its thunder
and the alder's shouts drop to a murmur,

the stories of trees
cling to our clothes, unfurl in our hair.


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