Jo Shapcott

Before - Sean O'Brien

Make over the alleys and gardens to birdsong,
the hour of not-for-an-hour. Lie still.
Leave the socks you forgot on the clothesline.
Leave slugs to make free with the pansies.
The jets will give Gatwick a miss
and from here you could feel the springs
wake by the doorstep and under the precinct
where now there is nobody frozenly waiting.
This is free time, in the sense that a handbill
goes cartwheeling over the crossroads
past stoplights rehearsing in private
and has neither witness nor outcome.
This is before the first bus has been late
or the knickers sought under the bed
or the first cigarette undertaken,
before the flush and cross word.
Viaducts, tunnels and motorways: still.
The mines and the Japanese sunrise: still.
The high bridges lean out in the wind
on the curve of their pinkening lights,
and the coast is inert as a model.
The wavebands are empty, the mail unimagined
and bacon still wrapped in the freezer
like evidence aimed to intrigue our successors.
The island is dreamless, its slack-jawed insomniacs
stunned by the final long shot of the movie,
its murderers innocent, elsewhere.
The policeman have slipped from their helmets
and money forgets how to count.
In the bowels of Wapping the telephones
shamelessly rest in their cradles.
The bomb in the conference centre’s
a harmless confection of elements
strapped to a duct like an art installation.
The Première sleeps in her fashion,
Her Majesty, all the princesses, tucked up
with the Bishops, the glueys, the DHSS,
in the People’s Republic of Zeds.
And you sleep at my shoulder, the cat at your feet,
and deserve to be spared the irruption
of if, but and ought, which is why
I declare this an hour or general safety
when even the personal monster –
example, the Kraken – is dead to the world
like the deaf submarines with their crewmen
spark out at their fathomless consoles.
No one has died. There need be no regret,
for we do not exist, and I promise
I shall not wake anyone yet.

Sean O'Brien. Emergency Kit. Edited by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney. Faber & Faber, 2004.
Retrieved from here.

Hairless - Jo Shapcott

Can the bald lie? The nature of the skin says not:

it's newborn-pale, erection-tender stuff,

every thought visible,—pure knowledge,

mind in action—shining through the skull.

I saw one, a woman, hairless absolute, cleaning.

She mopped the green floor, dusted bookshelves,

all cloth and concentration, Queen of the moon.

You can tell, with the bald, that the air

speaks to them differently, touches their heads

with exquisite expression. As she danced

her laundry dance with the motes, everything

she ever knew skittered under her scalp.

It was clear just from the texture of her head,

she was about to raise her arms to the sky;

I covered my ears as she prepared to sing, roar,

to let the big win resonate in the little room.

Retirado daqui.

Of Mutability - Jo Shapcott

Too many of the best cells in my body

are itching, feeling jagged, turning raw

in this spring chill. It’s two thousand and four

and I don’t know a soul who doesn’t feel small

among the numbers. Razor small.

Look down these days to see your feet

mistrust the pavement and your blood tests

turn the doctor’s expression grave.

Look up to catch eclipses, gold leaf, comets,

angels, chandeliers, out of the corner of your eye,

join them if you like, learn astrophysics, or

learn folksong, human sacrifice, mortality,

flying, fishing, sex without touching much.

Don’t trouble, though, to head anywhere but the sky.

Of Mutability, faber & faber, 2011.