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Jane Kirwan
The
Nest
Our neighbour is no longer here,
no longer covered in feathers and dust.
If her things are not to be lost, handbags forgotten
I’ll ignore the dried out honeycombs,
hunt through sheds – hay and old sheets –
remember in her ninety years
there must have been pleasure.
You rake the bonfire – her shelves, cupboards burn,
her rags, picture frames, her pegs.
I sit on the stool she used for sharpening scythes,
sort papers. Something’s been cut out,
an empty space in the front page
of Zemedelske noviny, August sixty-eight.
I put photos, postcards into an old box,
take it back across the lane.
It collapses,
contents falling among petals dropped
by the brief dark-red Pivonka
and you point to a line in the sky,
a sparrow-hawk soaring high and fast,
holding in its claws, like a gift, what looks like a nest.
Zemedelske noviny. Agricultural News
Pivonka. Peony.
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David Gill
Tokyo
Women in Transit
Knees tightly locked,
hand wrapping hand
demure on lap,
each woman nods,
touch-sensitive,
in shrunk inviolate space,
between the curtains
of fine black hair, half-drawn,
her sleeping
noh-mask
face.
Who knows in whose offices now
they stride among
the sheepish bows
of servile males,
at what giant desks
they raise their laser eyes
to burn their bosses
to the floor,
while switching millions
on the phone,
and fixing dinner-dates
with some director
or ambassador?
Their stop arrives:
they start up from their dreams
of roles reversed,
arise, but waver,
letting the gentlemen
go first.
from
ACUMEN 67
May 2010
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