Previously unpublished poem: 'Breath'

The second unpublished poem of mine that I wanted to share is called 'Breath'.

This poem is an old favourite of mine, and when I say old, I mean really old. I would have to look back in my notebooks to see when I actually wrote it, but I believe it was in Dublin in the early 2000s.

The image which is the genesis of the poem - the lilac and the iron sky - is from a very specific place and moment in time, in Dublin. When I moved to Dublin from Canada in 2002, I first stayed with my relatives in Dundrum for a few months, and then moved to a tiny flat on Greenmount Road in Terenure. It had a garden and I wonder why I hardly spent any time there - a combination of being busy and the unpredictable weather, probably. But my window looked out onto the garden, which was a blessing. And there was a lilac. It seemed to be a reflection of the lilac in the garden of my parents' house in Canada. The sunlight and the iron sky are very characteristic of the Dublin climate, and piercingly beautiful.

I really love this poem and have submitted it many times. Several times another poem in the submission was chosen, but not 'Breath'. I'm not sure if I have a clear view of the poem, as it's been in my life for so long. But it always calls up a very, very slow turning of the earth for me - the passage of time, but for a change, not in a painful way.


BREATH


Into the sudden sunlight
springs the lilac

under an iron sky
sleek as hematite

and the air is a prickling
sharp as cold ashes

blown past velvet houses
where light recedes

into the settled darkness
beyond the earth's shoulder 



Photo: "Lilac in Spring" by njtrout_2000 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Previously unpublished poem: 'Leaving Basel'

As I've failed to blog more frequently even in the midst of more-time-than-usual-on-my-hands-quarantine (I'm sure many of you can relate), I thought something I could do would be to share one or two (or maybe a few) of my unpublished poems. These are poems which I have faith in, and have probably sent out several times, but which have failed to find a home in journal-world.

I wrote the following poem 'Leaving Basel' while travelling in Switzerland several years ago. I had been staying with a friend in Basel in December and then took the train to Geneva for a quick visit before returning to London. The same trip, which began in Luxembourg, also yielded my poem 'Carousel', which was published in Strange Horizons and which you can read here: http://strangehorizons.com/poetry/carousel/

While I say this is a poem I have faith in, it's also fair to say that I never felt as though I got the ending quite right, and that is perhaps the poem's weakness. On the other hand, I don't feel as though I will ever get any farther with it. And maybe that's ok.



LEAVING BASEL


I was trying to explain the snow in terms of the light
as we drove to the station. The border houses slept,
the embassies sang softly and a breath of crystals rose
from their balconies. But I stopped trying
and just looked, because the muted shatter of snow
over the quiet city was not the long slow note of light
on water, and the wild ringing of sailboats
in the wind on Lake Geneva was another way of seeing.

What I learned was this:
we cannot even explain snow in terms of snow,
nor light in terms of light. Then this:
snow stops being here, and light fades. But love goes on,
and elsewhere snow clouds gather, and elsewhere the sun rises.

Photo by Clarissa Aykroyd: Sailboats on Lake Geneva, 2014.