Mother’s Last Christmas

Not the last of her life but the last
when she could cope with freedom,
an unfamiliar room.
 
We drove over the moor in a blizzard,
held our breath on the dips and rises,
the old house a longed-for refuge.
 
No neighbours, no lights from distant farms,
no birdcalls, even the snow fell
in a windless silence
 
and froze silently. There was
no going out on Christmas Day
to the plain brown chapel
 
where if there were no kings
there would be shepherds,
and three girls playing brass instruments –
 
mother and I confined to our stone shelter,
our fire, tête-à-tête meals
and radio. No visits
 
no visitors. Every morning I trudged
the half-mile to the sharp steep curve
gleaming with untouched ice
 
and every evening at the open door
described to my blind listener
the silver moon, the unreachable silver hills.
 

Chris Considine

in collection, In Search of Home, 2015, Cinnamon Press, 2015,
ISBN 978-1-9090775-3-9

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“A feasting presence full of light”

I’d thought I wouldn’t know the seasons any more –
bird voices always gulls’ wailing. Couldn’t say
I heard the first curlew or The lapwings are back,
couldn’t tell the month by the colours of grass.
But here light is the witness.
 
Sun rises there or there, then or not till then,
printing the picture of the window on a wall.
Light’s a presence in the room, filling the loneliness.
It’s like something you can only imagine – an angel
for example, something alarming.
 
In the old house light was grainy, golden,
backed with shadow. Furniture dozed in the low rooms.
This sea-swollen light’s not soporific, it’s ice, bright knives,
kills colour, cuts into my eyes so that I turn my back,
draw blinds before I’m blinded.
 

Chris Considine

in collection, In Search of Home, 2015, Cinnamon Press, 2015,
ISBN 978-1-9090775-3-9

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Biopsies

The left breast of St. Sebastian
pierced by four arrows. Oh. Oh. Withdraw
the steel gently.
 
Back and forth to the hospital, past
the tattoo parlour – tattoos, piercings –
but these four dots
 
these puncturings will not flaunt themselves
in gold or silver. These bluish stains,
not shaped like birds
 
or butterflies, are secret markers,
remembrancers of the hidden wound
but they will clear
 
leaving no clue to the thing that sleeps
and fattens deep down, that I sometimes
don’t believe in.
 

Chris Considine

from Ill Winter, in collection, Behind the Lines,
2011, Cinnamon Press, ISBN 978-1-9070904-8-6

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Seeing Orange

To my mother this pungent steam
signalled a seasonal chore,
but I, like Marie Antoinette,
am playing countrywoman
and January is marmalade month.
 
I am a billionaire of time
and silence. Shall I choose, today,
to sing, draw, gaze at the unwearying
beauty of the view? Shall I feel moved
to iron a sheet, paint a wall, scrub a floor?
 
My fingers are sticky, stiff, swollen with cutting.
It’s back to basics, doing it the hard way,
the Zen of preserving – I become one with fruit,
knife, wooden spoon, the heavy pan
her mother gave to mine.
 
Whispery sugar shifts
in sparkling dunes and dies like snow
into the seething cauldron.
Windows mist and seal me
in sweetness with a bitter edge.
 
Thick gush into glass.
The molten-metal stream
clots, taking its time, and cools to stasis.
Ranked jars stand glowing
in fluorescent light.
 
Amber with its suspended life:
fibres of fruit, small-pored
vermilion slivers,
colours of copper, gold,
daffodil, sunrise, fire.
 

Chris Considine

in collection, Learning to Look, 2003, Peterloo Poets,
ISBN 1-904324-05-3

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