last update:
18th May16
from photograph by
Sabine Coe
e-mail Lesley
Lesley Saunders website
poetry favourites:
Jane Draycott
The High Window
Two Rivers
and in the shop…
collections –
“Angels on Horseback”
(pamphlet)
Smith|Doorstop;
“Periplous”
(chapbook)
Shearsman Books;
“The Walls Have Angels”
“No Doves”,
and
“Some Languages are Hard to Dream In”
(chapbook, also avail in Romanian translation)
Mulfran Press;
“Cloud Camera”
Two Rivers Press;
others –
“The Glass House”
and
“Ordinary Treasure”
Asylum
‘I will take you myself on my shoulders and the task will not
weigh heavy on me’
– Vergil, Aeneid II, 708
The young women here are headscarved and majestic
and they drive like fury along the city’s unmade roads.
Do they, in the marrow of their quick bones, remember
how one night they were hoisted on their fathers’ shoulders
and the blanket that was flung over their sleepy dark heads
like another dusk? How not so long ago a man ran and ran
through the ruinous flames, and on his back his own father
still clasping the household gods to his shrunken chest
in case one day there would be a home again to put them in –
not a burnt-out truck or fenced-in camp on the edge of town,
but honey-cakes and thick coffee, the evening star to steer by?
Lesley Saunders
first published – as the prize-winning poem – in Live Canon 2015 Anthology,
ISBN 978-1-9097031-3-1;
video recording at YouTube
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