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last update: 17th Jan19

 

 

Papier Blanc                      Wasps

 

Hilda, Unity and Dolls                      After Sonnet 64, Shakespeare

 

Papier Blanc

It is a night over the Baltic. My cruise ship
purrs across its quiet pond. Programmed
for darkness, I stare at luminous sky.
 
It is a bedsheet, clean and starched,
stretched on a mattress, waiting to be creased
or torn or stained with piss, blood, semen.
 
It is the blindness of a blizzard in New York
which hurries all to shelter, fetters taxis, cars;
pinions synapses, deep-freezes my thoughts.
 
It is that moment when you’ve had the sedative,
been wheeled along a corridor, through rubber doors
to men in masks who prick your hand, ask you to count
 
and now I’m counting minutes since I first
stared at this white desert. Do I dare become
a tribe of ants to set out tracks just visible from space?
 

Jean Watkins

first published online at The High Window, October 2018;
in collection, Precarious Lives, 2018, Two Rivers Press,
ISBN 978-1-909747-41-8



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Wasps

As with ton-up boys
     the first thing was
          a hostile hum
               the faintest trace
          then louder louder
     as the tiger-insect neared,
a black and yellow
menace. At tea
     under the apple tree
          it would hover, land
               on the lip of your cup
          circle a head; freeze
     the cool ones, panic
the hot, who’d flap
spill tea or run.
     Gangs raided jampots
          at that tea garden
               by the river, jewelled
          your scone with threat.
     Where have they gone?
No more bicarb
on stings, dead bodies
     on the window-sills,
          no drunkards on windfall apples,
               pot-holes in the plums,
          no flight path
     under the soffit
papery nests in the loft.
 

Jean Watkins

first published in Acumen 82, 2015, ISSN 0964-0304;
in collection, Precarious Lives, 2018, Two Rivers Press,
ISBN 978-1-909747-41-8



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Hilda, Unity and Dolls

     Stanley Spencer 1937
 
Lips are the things you notice first –
the humans’ full and sensual like his,
dolls’ in the rigor of a rosebud smirk.
 
Next necks – Unity’s frail as a mushroom’s,
dolls’ drainpipe hard. Hilda’s rope-like tendons
groan with the stress that’s echoed in the set
of her mouth, her inward-looking eyes.
 
One eye is severed by her spectacles’ steel rim,
edge of the picture has trepanned her heavy hair
as though he knew, not knowing, that her apathy
came not from cussedness but illness.
 
The child whose name had now a bitter taste
stares out, touch of defiance in her lifted chin,
her eyes clear windows. Boredom looks out,
perhaps suppressed dislike, a sense of wrong.
 
As for the dolls, their masks with black-hole eyes
are sinister, grotesque. Only my fancy, surely,
that their names might be Dorothy and Patricia.
 

Jean Watkins

first published in Stanley Spencer Poems: An Anthology, 2017, Two Rivers Press,
ISBN 978-1-909747-27-2;
in collection, Precarious Lives, 2018, Two Rivers Press,
ISBN 978-1-909747-41-8



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After Sonnet 64, Shakespeare

When I have seen how we have poisoned seas
with micro-plastic never to decay;
scarred landscapes, nuclear waste, the death of trees,
how hives collapse, song thrushes fall away.
 
When I have seen tall ice-cliffs fracture, fall,
watched people wading down a flooded street;
when maize crops shrivelled by the drought appal,
raise ribs, leave infants suckling a dry teat;
 
Then, Shakespeare, does your balance overturn
for Nature cannot heal the spoils of men.
The wise set targets, try to halt the harm
but tides of appetite grow strong again.
 
Though you beyond your mistress had no fears
We tremble for our children down the years.
 

Jean Watkins

first published in Reading Creative Arts Anthology 2018, ISBN 978-0-7049157-6-3;
in collection, Precarious Lives, 2018, Two Rivers Press,
ISBN 978-1-909747-41-8



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