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Frogmore 2010

featured poet: Ruth O’Callaghan

While Waiting for Bad News (extract)

April is the cruellest month…
                                       T.S.Eliot The Burial of the Dead

                                                       1

How can one letter weighing only a few grams
                 hold so much time suspended?

                   What have they not told you?
                    What have I not?

                                               ******

You are my Seven Sisters
walked in snow and rain,
my winter sun hanging low
             in a ragged sky.

Sweeter than the apple in the attic
stored till winter’s end you are
the pasture where lions and lambs lay
the garden in which the wren rests.

Where will I run to, where hide
when winds rip trees from roots,
boats from moorings? Why, to you,
             my anchor, my anchor.

4

Were you a bird I’d eat the skin, bone, feathers of you.

Though I would save one bone, one feather,
not as a keepsake for that would be within me,
– having gorged your strength, your gentleness –
but to make a mark on clay or cuneiform, papyrus
or paper, use your bone to press keys, your iridescent
feather for a quill to form letters in the old way.

The alphabet of days is lodged in you
without you there is no holy Sunday
only Wednesday’s child, full of woe.

Where will I take my sorrow?
The house cannot hold it
and the garden has its own rue