VERSEWRIGHTS
  • Welcome
  • All Poets
  • PoetryAloud
  • Inbox Peace
  • The Press
  • Journal Archives

Dick Jones


Names of the Moon

Sucked pebble:
tongued smooth by black sand.
Starflecks on a sable field,
sour white, bleached as night,
juice dried, a flat splash.

Old coin:
dun metal edged like a
flint shard, spent, effaced,
the ghost profile watching
west, the setting point.

Bleached horns:
hook hanging, depending nothing
but planet-wrack,
clipped strings of light,
the dead hair of comets.

Broken button:
tugged and twined, frayed against
the cape and cowl, shrugged high
and loose in ice-heart
marrowbone dark.

Flat cataract:
milk or smoke or silica,
obscuring the macula, watching
only what she remembers
of red shift, of spectrum drift.

Abalone pearl:
infected by a flushed horizon
thus pink and purple,
deep elliptical,
frozen albumen.

Eyes in the night:
tsuki, menes,
chand, spogmay,
he’ni, loar,
namwaikaina.

Mal

Strange word, ‘stroke’ - a gentle sleep
and then you wake up,
changed. Caressed by infirmity
on the brown hill, kissed
by disability as you climb
the long drive. The farmhouse tips
and, heart in crescendo,
you embrace the grass.

Indifferent sheep manoeuvre,
crowding out your sky.
You lie in a lump, adrift
at the field’s edge, floating
on the dead raft
of your limbs.
The sun nails light
into your one good eye.

Near dusk her scarecrow voice
scatters your crowding dreams:
she calls you from the house,
the sound of your name
curling out of the past,
a gull-cry, fierce, impatient,
tearing at the membrane
that has dimmed your world.

Root-still, potato-eyed,
you are another species now.
Your medium is clay and saturation.
Mummified, like the bog-man
trapped by time, you lie dumbfounded,
mud-bound and uncomprehending
as the sun slips down
behind the hill.

The urgent fingers
scavenging for a heartbeat,
fluttering like bird-wings
at your throat,
are busy in the dark.
You feel nothing
of their loving panic,
their distress.

All love, all optimism, pain,
all memory, desire coarsen,
thicken into vegetable silence.
A dim siren wobbles in the dark.
And then rough hands manhandle
your clod-heavy bulk..
Night swallows the spinning light
and closes in like smoke.


Picture
Picture
                                                                            
Dick Jones Profile

Superstitions

Across my godless sky 
a magpie skids, 
a barcode flash, 
trailing misfortune.

I paint a cross 
onto the air. 
And then that night 
it’s the full moon 

bagged in clouds 
swollen with snow.
I must drop 
three wishes into 

her milk-heart 
before the clouds 
hustle her away. 
In a last heartbeat 

of light, I invest 
a trio of dreams. 
But silently, as if 
to confound negotiation, 

snow fills the bowl 
of the universe, 
the sky falls to meet 
the rising earth 

and the seams 
are drawn. White 
darkness, a breast 
of feathers. Without

my lodestars, compass 
spinning, this sailor
must dead-reckon
his course alone.

Bebee Ellen's Merripen*

Sometimes they stand in twos
and threes at the edge
of the road, arms folded,
eyes unfocussed, expecting nothing

but more of the same. Dogs bark
staccato over the pulse of generators.
Washing flickers between the vans,
random semaphore, and clocks

run slow. Sun rises over the wasteland,
sets behind the chain link fence.
And on Sunday old Aunt Helen died.
Inside her trailer mourners fidget,

watched by the gold-haloed faces
of her best Crown Derby plates.
No-one speaks but half-words form
in the gas fire’s popping, in the wind

around the broken door. Holding flowers
and a card he cannot read, brush-headed
Johnny, the boxer hero, racks tears
into a cushion. Sister Lizzie    

glances sideways, gnaws a fingernail.
Traffic raises curtains in the rain
and Georgie stands where his mother
used to sit at night with her roll-ups

and her pint of tea. Arms folded
and his eyes unfocussed, he dreams
awake, pondering atavistic visions
of the fires of Little Egypt,

of the briar and the gorse,
of slower tides than these
that pull us all from history
and into the new lands.

*Bebee Ellen’s Merripen: Aunt Ellen’s Death in Anglo-Romani.

Bridge of Dreams

Sitting here between you in the dark,
breathing hard from the stairs, your cry
my summons, I wonder where these boat

beds are floating you all tonight. I wonder
what kind of cataract spilled you and then
splashed you back.  Is there for us a commonwealth

of dreams? I ask into the dark. Are you both
heir to my dusty fears? You lie across your beds,
beached starfish, the ragged pulse of nightmare

flickering behind your eyes. I try to read
its narrative through shadow and across
the years. Is there, then, a great pontoon

of dreams, bound together like Xerxes’ ships
across the bay? And may I cross it, boat
by boat and so go back, go forward?

Comments?

***

​Thank you for visiting Tweetspeak VerseWrights.
© 2012-2018. VerseWrights. All rights reserved.:
Acrostic Poems
Ballad Poems
Catalog Poems
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Poems
Epic Poetry
Fairy Tale Poems
Fishing Poems
Funny Poems
Ghazal Poems
Haiku Poems
John Keats Poems
Love Poems
Math, Science & Technology Poems
Ode Poems
Pantoum Poems
Question Poems
Rondeau Poems
Rose Poems
Sestina Poems
Shakespeare Poems
Ship, Sail & Boat Poems
Sonnet Poems
Tea Poems
Villanelle Poems
William Blake Poems
Work Poems

To translate this page:
  • Welcome
  • All Poets
  • PoetryAloud
  • Inbox Peace
  • The Press
  • Journal Archives