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last update: 13 Dec 10

 

 

Irish Gold                      Sisters

 

The Alphabet                      Time Is My Mind

 

Irish Gold

   Gold ornaments of the Late Bronze Age, found at Tumna, Co. Roscommon 1834.

Bigger than puffballs,
Some dented like tin,
Now under glass, on hessian,
Not pearly skin,
Resting in the museum shallows,
Green in their blush.
Nine gold baubles
Once hidden in the peat bogs
By unknown hands,
Without a song, without a sound,
When men came on horseback
And women lost their ground.

Jehane Markham

in collection, 20 Poems, 1999, Rough Winds



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Sisters

Like having three mothers
Fold back your hair.
 
In the way we raise our eyes
And shut them for a long second.
 
We always smile at waiters.
We crave special relationships with doctors and nurses.
Even the man behind the ticket office
 
Blossoms under our eyes.
How we adore kindness!
Nothing less than kittenish,
 
We worship the postman
With his burden of paper mouths;
The last messenger on earth.
 
Lost and found by the fireside,
Hormonally engaged
With our genetic hand-me-downs,
 
We are all soul
And no backbone and
Our gravity is water, our roots are blood.

Jehane Markham

in collection, 30 Poems, 2004, Rough Winds



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The Alphabet

How can I know you will stay till the end?
Not stifle a yawn, drift off,
Letting go my hand like a friend
 
Who suddenly remembers her own life,
The burdens and blocks in the bend,
Waiting like bullies to scoff
 
At the inadequate hold of my mind.
There’s so much I don’t know,
The way the heart pumps the blood,
 
The way the lungs inflate and blow.
Very basic things are hard to understand,
How the alphabet stumbles and grows,
 
A caravan of elephants crossing the sand;
Ballooning girth, stringy tails,
A slow train moving over paper land,
 
Trunk by trunk and flapping ears,
As the seconds collect like flies on my nervous hand,
Each letter holding its own tears.
 
And the cows standing in green fields,
Smooth as lead in creased positions
Of attendance and symbiosis to the weald.
 
Hedges are bustling with life and louse,
Braiding the hills with ancient vigour,
Catching birds in their sideways house.
 
Leaves are thrusting into light,
Filigrees of stalk and stem,
Thorns stick into flesh and white
 
Buds on the branch like pearls on a ruff,
The anthers dipped in pink,
Smell of wild honey, woodland stuff.
 
Once the alphabet was only just
A collection of feathers, bones, sticks,
Washed by the rain and dried to dust.
 
Before words there was only the shape of things:
An oval for an eye,
A boomerang for a mouth that sings.
 
Was it a Semite soldier, who carved the first lines?
Into sandstone, two thousand B.C.,
Rising above Egyptian turquoise mines?
 
Now words make the world shared
In black patterns of relief,
War, pain, grief, love, beauty are all bared
 
In the small print under which we sink,
Travelling thousands of miles
As we cross our legs, blow our noses, blink.

Jehane Markham

published in Ambit 200, 2010



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Time Is My Mind

Time is my mind
(and all the things that will happen or not)
The hyacinths sticking their curled heads out of the blue jug,
The cat pressed against the bottom door of the Rayburn.
Time is dust under the bed and unworn stockings curled in the drawers.
Time is smoke rising from the chimney and a new moon like a shrimp in the black net of a tree.
Time is in the chickens scratching in the straw and the drip of water from the outside tap.
Time is in the spindly, sprouting sweet peas.
Time is a baby asleep, face as blank as an uncooked cake.
Time is in the stiff tulips holding up their closed dishes of red and yellow before breaking apart under the slow drag of opening days.
Time is trains and stations and being late, rushing like a storm of electrical impulses towards something hard and slippery.
Time is the ticket collector waiting at the gate.
Time is the track, the lane and the road.
Time is the motorway from city to city.
It is the snake rising like a gloved finger from beneath the stone.
Time is my ego
(and all the things that will happen or not)
A crazy old tramp lifting up his head from the dustbin of my thoughts.
Time is a jug of dreams poured into me –
Don’t stop.

Jehane Markham

published in Ambit 200, 2010



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