Do survivors dream of the polar bear?

Grandmother told me stories of our land:
swaddled in soft white, varnished in hard white;
colder than pebbles from the dark sea bed,
and no trees anywhere. Great monsters trod
the cold hard soft white, wearing hand-deep fur
coloured like thick cream from the milking urn
and teeth like lobster’s claws. Sometimes we find
their fangs and bones, washed paler than their fur.
Then there were lands like this one, bright with grass,
stretching around the globe’s round skin down to
a mirror of our land then, empty of men,
colder than sea caves, whiter than wavetop foam,
growling with savage life…
                 But the sea rose.
The bright lands sank, the sun burned; only
the humped highlands stick like arid coals
out of the lukewarm sea. We’re very few;
we sit upon the warm shore, under the
heavy sky; we watch the waves licking
each day higher, unburying the bones.
 

Lynn Roberts

Winner, Pulsar Poetry Competition, 2010

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Archaeology on Bosworth field

Over generations the slow earth spasms
indiscernibly, spitting detritus
out of history’s gut across the chasms
between us and how we choose to see
the natives of the past – phantasms
of technicolor, digital, reborn
          in idiom just like ours;
 
until time swiftly – shockingly – narrows,
eras park side by side in a man’s hand.
He holds the waste of war – not the arrows
of imagination, not the bullets
they really found, not shrapnel from the shallows
of the years, wart-covered iron balls
          like Vulcan’s ferrous sweat –
 
he holds a little wild boar statant, gilt
on blackened silver, with a curling tail
and snarling mouth, as if it just saw spilt
over the tussocky heads of August grass
a fearful slash of blood, and felt the guilt,
the failure to protect the young warlord,
          the last Plantagenet.
 
Echoing round it are the scrape and clang
of murder, effort of grunting breath, thud
and scream of boots; grass scent and metal tang
of blood; sobbing of wounded horses; the
November smell of gunpowder and bang
of early ordnance; the desperate prayer
          to find another mount –
 
which, polished up by poetry, unfurled
a perfect five-foot line. The silver boar
arches between that lost, pre-Shakespeare world
and this; between the man with anxious eyes and
the celluloid cartoon, mouth smirked and curled,
grotesquely hunched: but under that mask, behind
the oxidized black tarnish of the mind,
          is the cool sterling core.
 

Lynn Roberts

Winner, Northampton Literature Group Open Poetry Competition, 2010

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Lunchtime with Eros

Run your fingernail along my arm once more,
so the down shivers erect like grass plumes
and brushes – kisses – against your own; your
warmth breathes out over my skin and heat blooms,
smoothing it there – just there; and all the while
our arms lie quietly on the table top,
not touching, and our eyes don’t meet.  Your smile
is printed for me on your glass, the knop
stamped with your fingerprints, and on your plate
crumbs and a cheap old nickel fork contain
your DNA – spirals of life which wait
like flies in amber, microscopic chain
of polymers – codes which infiltrate
this bar, transfiguring the mundane.
 

Lynn Roberts

published in Agenda, vol.45, No. 4/ vol.46, no.1, ‘Dwelling Places’, 2011

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Botticelli’s Venus and Mars

Lying along the canvas, draped criss-cross
like scissors open to their widest yawn,
they touch but are as separate as stars;
his pearl and perfect body lies inert,
washed up, a drift of flotsam on the bank,
sleep-sodden, senseless, supine, satiate;
lips parted, one hand curving up for alms
which she has given him.
                                                      You would not know,
looking at her, perhaps; she’s poised, alert;
groomed to a hair – and then what hair it is,
ochre and fox fur, woven, looped and skeined
into the braided edging of her dress,
piercing a brooch where it becomes a gem,
emerging as another length of braid.
She is immaculate, unmarked by love;
no flighty Titian on a rumpled bed,
hair combed by urgent fingers; she’s as cool
and pristine in white silk as he is hot,
sweat drying, armour gone and war put off
until another day.
                                        Her dimple shows
she’s quite aware the war’s already lost.
 

Lynn Roberts

published in Shit Creek Review, Issue 14 ‘Gods’, 2011

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