Sunday 29 November 2015

Another child's poem- Elephant

Elephant
O Elephant, Elephant! You giant of Earth
Your step is mighty, enormous your girth.
When you walk with a mighty thud
You are an earthquake that trembles my blood.

O Little one, Little One! That’s your belief.
To myself I’m as light as a leaf.
I skip lightly, dancing the Earth,
Birds circle my ears and my tusks are curved.

A nose like a tongue that I use like a hand,
I can delicately pick, or mightily slam.
I speak in a voice too low for your ears,
But I am singing the song of the spheres.

I am guardian of the Land, my footprints become lakes,
My grandmothers know the paths I must take.   
My memory’s so long I understand death,
And always mourn the last dying breath.

So, Little One, though you think I am massive,
And heavy and craggy like a big cliff,
That little beetle who walks on the ground
Thinks HE is the biggest thing around. 

Hiraeth – a Welsh word meaning longing for home.

HIRAETH

Hiraeth is in my bones.
My tide of longing
For that far star
That shines so faithfully
In my night sky,
Its hard brilliance a beckoning,
Far-heard call
Over the night-waves
Of my breathing, sighing sleep.

My bones quietly disintegrate.
I return to essence,
And find the one tiny particle of self
Amid star-sand.



·         

Poem about revisiting a memory from my childhood home

Toffee Coloured Flint

In that place where the flints
Are toffee-coloured,
A cold, snot-drawing
Wind cuts to the
Quick white-packed sky
Glaring heavy on those
Ridges you only notice
Now on the bark of
The bare-stripped tree.
That oak-apple almost sings
In the grey-white light
And only the stones
Still hold a memory of
Summer heat-haze and
Sandals scuffing in
The green-scented
Dry of the path.

The deep amber of
The flint holds more
Than memory of summer.

Place. Self. And Dream.
All there, prefigured
In calcite. 

Thursday 12 November 2015

Poem accepted by Reuben Woolley's I am Not a silent Poet webzine

https://iamnotasilentpoet.wordpress.com/2015/11/12/on-reading-about-two-children-under-11-who-were-raped-by-soldiers-in-sudan-by-cath-blackfeather/

On reading about two children under 11 who were raped by soldiers in Sudan

If I were the only little girl
Who was held down
And raped
That would be one too many.

If these two little girls
Whose bodies were split apart,
Their secret, sacred places
Made into raw meat,
Were the only ones,
That would be too many.

I am sinking under
The sewage tide of
Laughing, cheerful men,
With eyes fixed zealously on
Their great tasks,
The wonders they will perform
To make the world in their own image,
While little bodies lie stunned
Under them.
I can’t give up,
Because they don’t.
I have to keep going,
Because they do.

My crone-womb hangs
Like a dry piece of meat
In the bone-bowl of me.
But it speaks in the quietest,
Deepest voice of all.
A whisper that is of the Earth.
That shrieks the rage the outrage
Of us all.
It is our blood that is sacrificed
In this most un-sacred way.

When mothers tramp thousands of miles
To find a safe place for their daughters
And are turned away, traded and discarded,
Again and again.
And they walk on, further.
I, too, must hold on.
Because they do.
I have to remember who I am,
Because they do.