FEBRUARY FAVOURITES

The three most popular blog poems published during February were Hibernation, In Grace and Quarry. 

Here’s an opportunity to read them if you missed them first time round. 
If you'd like to see the original narratives that accompany each of these poems you'll find them on the following dates: 1st, 18th and 24th February by using the Older Posts key below.

HIBERNATION

Hibernation over, they wake

hungry. Then swiftly re-engage

in animal things: so the cycle

begins again. We understand that.

Is it fanciful to wonder

if they dream? Or is their slumber

incomprehensible, like death,

devoid of sense of anything?

IN GRACE

The present is arcane and strange

and any recollection left

of what has happened in the past

is vague and liable to change.         

Of future plans, he is bereft,           

for nothing now is hard and fast.   

They give him multicoloured pens

and paper, as one might a child.

Familiar voices interweave.

He sees, through a distorting lens,

people who wept, people who smiled,

that, one by one, stood up to leave.

He is content. He lives in grace.

What matter if the moments blur,

if his nocturnal thoughts are grim?

He has escaped himself: his face,

a kind of absence in the mirror,

comforts and somehow pleases him. 

QUARRY

Pockets weighted with rocks,

she sinks like a stone, down

through engulfing blackness.

The sudden coldness shocks;

dark water spreads her dress

as she begins to drown.

Steep granite walls surround,

like hands, this black water:

their blunted fingertips,

coarse stone-scarred, cupped around

a pitchy ale. Her lips

imbibe it. Drowned daughter,

she descends through grey seams

hewn by generations 

of quarrymen, long dead.

Her ears absorb the screams

of cutting-tools that fed 

slabs to loading stations,

harsh shouts, profanities

and laughter, trapped in stone. 

In bottomless darkness,

spinning, suspended, she

is free from time’s duress,

constraints of blood and bone,

all that once assailed her. 

Years will pass, rain and sure

forgetfulness will come

like longed-for sleep. Weeds stir

her hair. She will become

timeless, unsullied, pure,

assimilated in   

water, stone, and submit 

her flesh to nature’s game

then, snakelike, shed her skin,

while those that knew her name

will misremember it.