Secret Villages

Home is the place you travel towards,
The best destination. Maybe you see it now
After the next bend or the next
Where villages jump up without reason,
Explain themselves quickly, are swallowed away behind,
Already you’ve passed that stage.

Maybe it lies extremely where
The perfect places are, that track,
You know it leads across to the secret villages
Their quiet lights appearing,
Remoteness leaves you with nothing more to say.

Rennie Parker

in collection, Secret Villages, 2001, Flambard Press,
ISBN 1 87 3226 43 8

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Astounded Barns at Polebrook Hundred

The region of cut metal,
light’s precision, painful where it goes. Work
on the singular image, light –
controller, you who projects many stars;
the mere ground stunned
for such pertinent attack,
your shadow-scissors sieze on anxious space
– that fractured delight –
original colour, forced through.

Their edges are startling as wire
alive to the touch, blue shock
stuck to their corners,
flat, delivered forward, like on a plate;
sun-blind crepuscular walls
grown hairy with plants,
particular trees…
bitter light fallen through leaves,
glanced off, as if solid.

Rennie Parker

in collection, Secret Villages, 2001, Flambard Press,
ISBN 1 87 3226 43 8

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Would You Like Some Biscuits with that Tea?

I know I can talk to you, you look like a Pisces. Well,
You wouldn’t believe how big this house can feel.
Here’s some magazines. Is the room OK?

I think I’ll have to sell this place next year.
My ex, he won’t pay up. It’s all my fault.
My friends have tried to drill it into me:

‘He’s done it once, he’ll surely do it again’.
And now he’s off with a young piece down in Kent.
He left me with the lot, the house

The bills, the kids, the debts he wouldn’t pay.
Of course she’s half his age and full of sex.
Would you like some biscuits with that tea?

I didn’t think he was the type, you know.
We’d moved round fourteen towns in twenty years
Just for his career. It drove me nuts

Decorating all those endless rooms,
More horrid squares for living in. And yes –
He said I was the homely, clinging one.

‘You’re so materialistic,’ he would spit
But when he brought his ghastly friends back here
I lived through hell if everything wasn’t right.

And now he’s gone. You’re looking quite dismayed.
On second thoughts, he sounds just like the type
Doesn’t he. I never saw it coming.

Rennie Parker

in collection, Newborough County, 2001, Shoestring Press,
ISBN 1 899549 53 6

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Burrow Mump, Deadened by the Sun

Windows are open to let the badness out.
Hummocked cattle slump on the seething green.

The school bus arrives. It is packed full of chairs.
A taxi leaps over the bridge and disappears.

No no no says the butterfly’s flight
Doddering over banked-up nettles.

Traffic lights scream STOP at the empty road.
Angles of buildings cut everyone’s voices down.

Rennie Parker

in anthology, Reactions 3 (ed. Esther Morgan),
2002, Pen & Inc, ISBN 1 902913 16 7

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