Autolycus

     The Winters’ Tale
 
Of course you know me – all together now:
a snapper up of unconsidered trifles!
There – you’re smiling already. You don’t need me,
I’m not important for the plot, but I make you happy.
You can’t resist my ballads, sing them long after
I’ve taken my final bow. I’ve wares to sell –
ribbons, damasks, silks – and that good feeling
spending brings. You laugh at my tricks, never notice
it’s your purse I’m filching. There there’s the costumes –
I get to change clothes twice and end up
wearing the prince’s three-pile velvet.
All this from a simple stage direction
Enter Autolycus singing
and I shift the play from winter into spring.
 

Mary Robinson

from A Comonty, in collection Trace,
2020, Oversteps Books, ISBN 978-1-906856-85-4

 
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G

     sickle
 
Graveyard grasses
speak in susurrant siftings
 
ragged robin, toadflax, vetch
tick with insect traffic
 
a sickle’s nicked blade
arcs ick, ick, ick
 
stems fan and fall
in syllabic ells
 
a lost geography
of language
 
field names
forgotten farms
 
the last speaker
of a dying tongue.
 

Mary Robinson

in pamphlet collection Alphabet Poems, 2019, Mariscat Press,
ISBN 978-1-9160609-2-0

 
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Kingfisher, water, sky

That tell-tale after-flash of cobalt,
the retina’s image a split-second
late transferring to the brain
 
a dream of blue
a certain scattering of light
 
it is always ahead
its beak hurled like a hinge-spike
quenched in water
 
light undresses, sheds
its crimson velvets, its yellow muslins
until only its blue shot-silk remains
 
in slow-motion film
a kingfisher dives,
rises a watery phoenix, scattering
drops like sparks
 
from space our blue planet, our blue water
 
and as we go down into deep ocean
blue is the last light to go
 

Mary Robinson

in collection Trace, 2020, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-906856-85-4

 
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Seal

We skitter
past derelict mine workings,
scratch through gorse –
its yellow flowers
spicing the spring air –
and leap the last stone steps
to the shore.
 
They’re ahead of me,
tearing off clothes,
printing the soft sand
with their feet
gasping and shrieking
as their winter skin
hits the nacreous sea.
 
They swim
with youth’s easy grace.
The cove’s gentle arms
enclose them.
A black float
off the headland
marks where men drown
their pots each night.
 
A dark head glistens –
they are joined
by another. No one
sees or hears him arrive.
They tread water and watch
a whiskered face
shining fur
heavy shoulders
the plectrum eyes of an old man.
 
Weeks later, walking
past uncut oats and kale,
I hear seals out on the skerries
half a mile away.
Ghostly, amelodic,
their voices
not a lament or cry
but a cantata
 
of abstract sound.
The music
of sea caves and tide race,
singing for the days
we hide inland.
I think of storms
and my two sons asleep
sailing on a sea of dreams.
 

Mary Robinson

in collection The Art of Gardening, 2010, Flambard Press,
ISBN 978-1-906601-14-0

 
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