Sestina: advice to women

When you went off climbing mountains
I acted like most other women:
cultivated patience, wisdom,
sought consolation in reading poetry,
joined an ecological movement,
kept my eyes off calendars, clocks.
 
When you started collecting clocks,
piled them in the house in ticking mountains,
explained the secrets of their movement,
I smiled and nodded, in the way of women.
You said their chimes were cosmic poetry.
I held my tongue, with my female wisdom.
 
When you studied ancient wisdom,
told me time wasn’t trapped in clocks,
and read me selections of Sanskrit poetry
sitting cross-legged on top of mountains,
I went along with it. Like many women
I could see these things brought change and movement.
 
When you took up dance and movement
and told me bodies were the whole of wisdom,
(especially men’s, since compared with women
men have different biological clocks),
I didn’t go and scream in the mountains,
but sought consolation in yet more poetry.
 
When you started writing poetry
I could see that this was a positive movement.
You deluged me with rhyming mountains
of paper. I loved your creative wisdom,
saw beauty in dustbins, cabbages, clocks,
sunsets and sandbags. God help women.
 
When you started collecting women,
saying they were needed for your poetry,
I burned your poems, smashed your clocks,
and joined the local anarchist movement.
You can stuff that ancient women’s wisdom.
Faith in men doesn’t move any mountains.
 
Advice to women: avoid movement;
keep clear of mountains; beware of clocks;
trust no one’s wisdom; don’t read poetry.
 

Michael Swan

in collection When They Come For You, 2003, Frogmore Press,
ISBN 978-0-9531383-6-4

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Request to the archaeologists

Come to the place quietly.
Leave your vehicles out of sight.
 
This is what there is.
Woods, river and hills,
dust, sun and spring rain.
 
It was ours.
 
Take your smallest tools;
dig slowly.
When you come to our bones,
use tiny brushes,
let the wind help you.
 
Leave our little bracelets
where they are.
 
Look carefully
as you uncover us.
Imagine, if you can,
the flesh back onto our skulls.
Listen
as our lips whisper a greeting.
 
Why did we build our houses in a circle?
But every child knows the reason.
Because the sky is a circle.
Because all life returns to its beginning.
Because you must make a wall
to keep out the wolves.
 
The walls are down now,
and the wolves are in.
 
When you drive home,
finish your reports,
and sit out in the evening,
think: this is what there is.
Woods, river and hills,
the wind, and a light rain, clearing;
children in the next yard.
 
And remember us.
 

Michael Swan

in collection The Shapes of Things, 2011, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-906856-19-9

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How everything is

Perhaps this is how everything is.
The scree steepens into rockface;
you work your way up ten or twelve pitches,
each worse than the one before,
the last a brutal overhang
with few holds, and those not good;
somehow, pushing your limits,
you struggle through to the top
with your arms on fire,
to find a car park, toilets and a café.
 

Michael Swan

in collection The Shapes of Things, 2011, Oversteps Books,
ISBN 978-1-906856-19-9

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Lillaz

1
 
The mountain is what it is.
The landscape fits together without a join.
There are the right number of trees.
The rocks are where they are.
The slope falls just so.
 
Marmot-holes
ibex-tracks
butterflies
rhododendrons
dust and scree
all have their places.
 
Words have no power here.
The mountain will accept little from us:
a small house grown into the hillside
a low cairn carefully built.
 
 
2
 
Under a rock
that no one has looked at
insects are busy;
in a fold of ground
where nobody walks
there are gentians;
hidden in a cleft
a stream falls.
 
Night comes;
there are stars in the water.
Light that set out
before our world was conceived.
 
A stone settles in the streambed.
In the time it takes to settle
we are born and gone.
 
A star fades a little
and the stream and the stone are past.
 
 
3
 
Here
on the last day
– a long last day
with the earth spinning slowly now
so far from the sun –
here
when the leaves fall for the last time
each leaf will fall in its place
(here there are no wrong places);
ibex
will fold their legs under them
quietly, quietly
with a last whistle of breath;
birds will perch
gentians fade
for the last time;
butterflies
that no one has looked at
will settle forever.
 
On the last day
so many things that we have not done
will not now be done.
 
But here
peacefully
at the right time
rivers will freeze;
there will be no more wind;
clouds will stand still;
no stones will fall;
the last light
will drain for ever
from the evening hills.
 

Michael Swan

in collection When They Come For You, 2003, Frogmore Press,
ISBN 978-0-9531383-6-4

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