Tsunami Girl

Her belongings, like skins,
float back to the original effluvia of ocean beds.
An archive of buttons, newly dyed with fish spawn,
congealed with masonry skill,
disturbs the isotopes of an ocean’s plan:
a crustacean, plotting the symmetries of its world
between its kelp stones,
stares at the hems and petticoats trailing him.
 
The pink ghosts of muscles still fasten
round the dress and an occasional sea bird
dips its beak into its folds, deciphering its smells,
the idiosyncrasy of its shapes: the neck stem displaced,
the dislocated spine of its buckle digging the waist
where a strong hold of sea lice thrill to its curves.
 
TV men with diving suits and tanks
return for a second take:
the satin dress holding itself up to the poles of the waves
like origami dancing, twitching lace mimicking breath,
sand filled pouch, its warmth.
It dances past the slow differential of a fin
its acrimony of scales, its Mache print of skin
 
to the laughing girl shedding herself
like Narcissi in the tsunami wave.
 

Harriet Torr

Commended in National Poetry Competition, 2008 and published in Prize-Winners anthology,
also published online at Poetry Society website

 
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Goliath’s Mum

Goliath’s mum had a busy time that morning
bantering and bargaining for some cloth
to make a pair of trousers for her son.
She had just hung them on the line
when the man arrived with the news.
He held up the stone and she saw
the pitted flesh, puckered as a baby’s face.
 
She stands in the kitchen and weeps
and the animals cease to make their noise
and the sun passes through her eyes into darkness
as she looks on the giant footprints of her son
leading away in the morning mud
to where the edges of the hills
imprint the basin of the killing plain.
 
‘They made him fight because he was big’ she said.
‘But he was not wise. For David although he was small
had the craft of things, the skill of killing beasts,
the art of watching for the certainty of the moment.
But Goliath he had a gentleness in building bridges
of pebbles in the tiny streams for the insect’s feet
where the fishes lay on their bellies in delight’
 
The deed done, the giant fallen –
her world closes round her like the night
on the petals of the dandelion
and she listens to the star’s storm of light
thrashing over the cold fields round her home.
And soon pity creeps like a kindly ghost
up the stairs to change things back
as she lies in wait for her grief.
 
And the sun and moon make parchment for their skin
and the bees and queens make honey for their lip
and the swans man makes whiteness for their soul
and the coalman makes black to paint the deed
and the pigments are stretched out to make saddles
for heroes and wagons to conquer the world.
 

Harriet Torr

John Burnside featured workshop poem, The Guardian, 2005;
Poem of the Week, St Marks, Buderim, 18th June 2015;
Set to music by Scottish composer Paul Crabtree – see Palm Beach Arts Paper

 
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Encounter

Most people don’t know about crows.
He doesn’t rip off lambs like they say,
at least, not when they are alive
he only goes for the dead ones
often coiled in a lump of snow.
Once, in the far north,
when I was wandering the world,
I saw a cage on the hillside,
in it a crow, unable to escape.
It had flown in through a one-way trap
to get a piece of dead lamb
strategically placed by the farmer.
It died hopping under a red-hot sun.
No water. The farmer had hoped that
this would serve as a warning to his kind.
But crows can’t do the algebra of happenings,
in the furlongs of the crow’s cranium
silence mainly broods against silence
and lessons learnt long ago:
the transverse crossing of twigs,
the geometric patterning of stars.
 
I slit the wires.
 

Harriet Torr

commended in Arvon and Daily Telegraph Poetry Competition, 2001
and published in Prize-Winners anthology

 
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Id

Id knew the fashioning of flint,
the hammering of stone.
He reckons distance by a foot’s stride,
the thumb’s grasp on rope, its pull.
 
He watches the world unfold
in the sheen of the bison’s flank;
the sun sweeping its skin,
the thrill of stars.
 
At night, in the dead man’s cave,
they make folds of origami for his suit;
each corner matching a hinge of sky
where airy constellations creep.
 

Harriet Torr

published in Poetry News, Summer 2004

 
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