The Earring

     for Annie
 
I want some colour this morning, a crimson top,
cherry-ripe earrings like the one I lost
in the half-term crowds crossing Temple Meads station.
Objects are always nagging; they have a passion
for pointing out lack of mindfulness, the cost
of insecure attachments. They never stop
being munched by larvae, losing their handles, chipping.
I was carrying a platter of roses in both hands,
crimson and gold, half-open. Above my head
the wrought-iron roof unravelled. Gold and red
are the colours of losing, heart or leaves or lands
or people, as now. I felt the earring flipping
down the side of my neck and off into the vast
store-rooms of the unclaimed. I wasn’t sure
how far to the village, where to catch the bus,
what to do if I missed it. Illness won’t wait for us
to grope for a silver shape on a grey stone floor.
It veers into the traffic, corners fast
then sends a text back from its journey’s end:
Twelve at the farm to join in the procession,
half past at the church. It’s only when you stand
beside the farm-track, roses in your hand,
you see that nothing stays in your possession,
not chestnut-trees, not hymn-tunes; not your friend.
 

Ruth Valentine

published in collection, On the Saltmarsh, 2012, Smokestack,
ISBN 978-09571722-1-0

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from The Government Scientist Deciphers the Clay Tablets

     i.m. Dr David Kelly
 
1
 
When Inanna set out for the underworld,
abandoning her temples
in Kish, Nippur, Adab, and Babtibira,
Uruk where her ziggurat
is worn to a dune; when Inanna took
 
the pot-holed road
from Nasariya beyond Baghdad, the word
for underworld that means under the mountain,
 
she told her companion, If I don’t come back
beat the drum for me in the public places.
 
It’s not that I think Iraq is the underworld.
I have travelled in dusty jeeps out from the cities,
looking for anthrax and botulism, and found
 
a mound in the sand, a stone gateway to air.
 
3
 
When Inanna doesn’t come back from the underworld
(but here you see me stoop into a car
in a raid of flash-bulbs) her woman-friend, Ninshubur,
goes to plead with the gods:
 
Do not let your bright silver
be covered with the dust of the underworld. Do not let
your fragrant boxwood..
 
Enki, who knows
compassion is the answer; Enki, who makes
the answer from the dirt of his finger-nails,
 
Enki the god of wisdom is in exile
in Philadelphia, sitting up late to watch
CNN news, knowing at home his mother
 
has no clean water. And in any case
it’s simple for gods. A scientist can be cut
into wood for the fire or stone for the stonecutter.
 

Ruth Valentine

published in collection, On the Saltmarsh, 2012, Smokestack,
ISBN 978-09571722-1-0

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Morecambe Bay

The rain is in exile,
                undocumented,
                               slipping through the hands
                                               of gorse and sodden
                               bracken   the drystone
                walls that detain the wind,
 
to the waterways,
                brimming beside the dark-
                               leaved rhododendrons,
                by the grey brick chimneys,
 
through lock-gates   hurrying   making
                remittances of itself,
                               smelling the salt
                                               on the welcoming wind,
                               embracing
 
the wide bay   spreading
                out on the sands,
                               deep under the sandbanks
                waiting.
 
From the Antarctic
                Berkner Island to Fimbul Ice Shelf
                               the tide begins,
 
turning its back on the icebergs
                intent, propelling
                               the heavy blue water
                north   seeking out the shorelines
 
Tierra del Fuego   fireland   Camarones
                Montevideo the estuary,
                               across
                Cape of Good Hope   Luanda
 
the great swell bending
                to the curves of the land
                               with every surge the wave
                reaching farther in
 
a change in the light
                a tumult
                               finding the cities
                slave-forts, plantations,
 
Monrovia   Georgetown
                enfolding the Caribbean
                               islands in foam,
                licking at the desert
 
Nouakchott   Casablanca
                sweeping past
                               the Pillars of Hercules
                Lisbon
 
A young boy venturing
                out in the lampless night
                               hears the wave crashing
                Sennen Cove   St David’s
 
till at two in the morning
                on the bay with the figures
                               bending to cockle-beds
                the hard swell finds
 
rainwater, an airpocket
                under a sandbank,
                               forages   crumbles the sand
                in ecstatic fingers –
 
The spring tide crosses
                eagerly towards you
                               speaking your language.
 
Shout.
                Give the migrant tide
                               your name to take home.
 

Ruth Valentine

published in collection, On the Saltmarsh, 2012, Smokestack,
ISBN 978-09571722-1-0

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The Announced

They are all across London,
solemn in not quite warm enough,
not quite rainproof raincoats,
                                                 going down
the escalators, standing
obediently on the right, not hurrying.
                                                 Or they wait
at the far end of the platform, bent like herons
over the track, the one mouse scuttling
between the rails, the now illegible
scraps of the freebie papers. Some
pace up and down, impatient for the moment
 
which will terminate here. Soon
theyÙll be stripped of even
that vital sign, a verb: due to a person.
It is what they always
aspired to, the state of harmlessness,
to be no longer responsible for holding
the grey sky on their shoulders to stop it crushing
 
beauty out of the city. They become
(in November, daily) an inconvenience:
At the present time, all trains
are non-stopping at Oxford Circus,
 
and live for forty years in the night vision
of the driver, the last
being to see them tremble, the aghast
unblinking eyes above the ballooning headlamps.
 

Ruth Valentine

published in pamphlet, The Announced, 2009, Sylph Editions,
in 3-part book: Ellipsis 1, ISBN 978-0-9558896-5-3

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