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Clark
Gable in Mansfield, 9-10, King's England, ISBN 978-1-872438-85-6.
Winner,
Hugh MacDiarmid Trophy, 2001, Scottish International Poetry
Competition.
Kirk Alloway
As
if someone just left, carefully closing the gate’s
buffed
metal, sidling past
Burns’
parents’ over-painted stone.
They
came from Kirk side, pausing where I stand now,
leaving
behind this chuntering, these lone
flames,
tonguing blanched yew bark,
until
yew trunk becomes a dark
hunched
woman, head bowed, bare
fingers
round jerked knees.
Arching
windows form spare
angels,
refusing casual tourists.
This
place won’t let me know
its
light-boned song,
tune
long
echoing
as travellers go.
Pipe-player,
etched on a low
tablet,
hints at rhythms
heard
by crow,
magpie,
and jackdaw,
taking
turns at being flock and minister.
Lyrics
swim an old grave’s sinister
Memento-mori,
running spores
patterning
like April snowflakes.
Here,
almost catch sleet’s rushing undercurrent.
Then
the silence of lids closed
by
familiar fingers,
arched
angels linger,
dusk
folds.
Walk
away, for then it starts, that song,
like
light snow dusting April streets,
descending
on late-parked cars,
on
shuttered shops and bars,
with
all but vagrant spirits sleeping.
Deborah Tyler-Bennett
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