Return by Noel Duffy

I just never learned to not look back.
I had to see that face one last time
to know, for sure, that it was her hand
I was holding as we approached the grove,
the sunlight shifting in the olive branches.

I turned reflexively and ossified my wife to salt,
my gaze upon her cursing all my hopes
to tears. She who was all that was best in me
frozen there with her hand reaching out for mine,
her eyes turned downward to the blackened ground.

And so each time she is lost to me, I must
regather my strength and repeat the ordeal,
descending again into the darkened world below,
understanding the fate that lies ahead of me,
but knowing I must face it anyway.

On Light & Carbon. Ward Wood Publishing, 2013.

Retirado daqui.

Small Sur - Under Trees

Mensageiros das Estrelas - 19-21 Novembro 2014

Ilustração: Miguel Santos/Design: Sara Didelet

Base - a poem by John Burnside

I 

All day the planes. Morning,
then afternoon.  

The roll of the tide  
the song of the earth  
drowned out  

by the screaming of engines  
that  
Nagasaki howl.  

II 

By the station at Leuchars  
the buds of a Japanese cherry  
are starting to break,  

the March light flowers and pools  
on a sandstone wall  

and out in the yellowing grass  
at the end of the platform  
a yellowhammer flits along the hedge  

its call half song, half  
fragment of conversation 

threaded between the twigs,  
insistent and pure  
like a question that no one can answer.  

It's repeated with small variations  
again and again, 

thrown to the wind 
that follows the simmer of tracks  

to the bridge in the midst of the fields
and that quiet beyond

where a dog fox wakes in the earth
to the scent of the evening 

and little owls float out beneath a moon
that feels so close we might, with one small step

abandon this wreck of a world and begin anew
in The Sea of Tranquility, Carmen, The Lake of Time.

III 

Spring and all. A shadow in the grass
is neither the shadow that forms
in a slant of light  

or the darkness that lingers an hour 
in the blue of day

but something worn: a vacancy; a gap;  
a slow tear in the fabric of the world
that blackens as it spreads, like oil, or blood, 

like oil, or blood, with every scheduled scream.

Retirado daqui.

TV On the Radio - Happy Idiot (New Single)

Display - Sinéad Morrissey

movement is life
- slogan of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, 1930‐1939

Hyde Park, 1936. Cold enough for scarves and hats
among the general populace, but not for the fifteen thousand women
from the League of Health and Beauty performing callisthenics
on the grass. It could be snowing, and they of Bromley‐Croydon,
Slough,
Glasgow, Belfast, would don no more than a pair of satin knickers
and a sleeveless satin vest to spin and stretch and bow
the body beautiful. Athens in London, under a sodden sky,
and Winnie and Molly and Doris metamorphosed.
On the edge of the revolving staves of arms and legs,
pale as comfrey – an army not yet on the move but almost ready –
there are tents for scones and tea. Kiddies, brought to watch
in caps and plaits, wriggle on deckchairs. Their mothers
carry vast, forbidden handbags on their laps and smell
of Lily of the Valley. All around the periphery,
in the huddled clumps of overcoats and smoke,
from offices and railway yards, men joke and talk, gesticulate –
but mostly they just look, quietly and sharply focused,
like eyeing up the horses at a racecourse, but with much more choice.
For those crammed in steaming picturehouses later, a commentator,
brusquely charmed, declares the perfection of British womanhood:
to them belongs the future! – while the ghost of Mary Bagot Stack,
whose dream this is, smiles back. Their hair cut short, slim,
co‐ordinated as the League of German Maidens or a chorus set
from Hollywood, fit for birth, the women twirl and kick,
do foot‐swings and scissor‐jacks, link hands or fall
suddenly flat as pegs in a collapsible building, then bounce back
up again, for movement is life and they are keeping moving.
To hell with it, they may as well be saying. Twist.
To hell with Lizzie Evans and her bitching hate.
With blood and vinegar. With getting in the tin bath last.
With laddered stockings. With sore wrists at the factory.
I’ve got the fresh‐air‐body they promised me. Twist. Its electricity.

Parallax. Carcanet Press, Limited, 2013.

Bon Iver - Heavenly Father