A folk memory of flame

Once we were familiar with flame –
 
we tended it as a live creature, we slept
by the flickering shadows on the cave wall
 
we smelled the peat reek in the crofter’s
black house (smooring the fire each night)
 
it was the place where we kept vigil for birth or death
 
we knew the craft of setting a fire –
crumpled paper, thinnest twigs, a scaffold
of sticks, a log charred from the last fire
 
the word ‘gleed’ for the glow in the grate, carrying
coals in a shovel to start the next room’s fire
 
hearth fire, heart fire; proddy rug, inglenook
(where a child and her grandfather sat)
 
the old prayer ‘kindle we pray thee …’
 

Mary Robinson

in collection Cynefin, 2024, Kailpot Press,
ISBN 978-0-9556860-8-5

 
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Swifts

We hear the screams
before we see them –
a chapter of hell’s angels
flick-knife wings slashing the air
 
black-clad dissenters piercing
the street with their keening
risk-taking pitch
 
smashing the glass hours
of this languid summer afternoon
 
hooked on speed
they fly straight at us,
veer off at the last moment
 
keep up, keep up,
we are not one but several
we are not several but one
 
it is surely a warning – the way
they stake their whole lives
on the globe still working.
 

Mary Robinson

in collection Cynefin, 2024, Kailpot Press,
ISBN 978-0-9556860-8-5

 
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A

Alphabet’s barn-shaped letter, that pastoral
initial settling the land. Trees split
 
like carcasses, crucks beam-pinned, lifted
from ground to gable, thatched up to the ridge-pole –
 
heather, straw, reed, whatever is at hand –
protecting us as an owl mantles
 
her wings over her young. Human sweat,
ox dung, hearth-fire’s smoking filth, winter
 
granary, beast shelter, food larder,
memory hoard. The way it is inhabited
 
as language is.
 

Mary Robinson

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

 
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The dependency

The Brontës knew it –
 
ventricles of the heart
filling and emptying,
lungs snatching
breath from the air
 
and the mind, slipped
from its leash, runs
ahead, flushes frail words
from the heather, purple
after winter burning
 
and later, round
the mahogany table
as they sit down to write,
the endorphin rush
like a drug.
 

Mary Robinson

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

 
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