Beached

The shore-line is full of bones, little white bird bones
and beached bleached branches stripped to their clean last,
fleshless and sapless among the stones,
skeletal recollections from the vast
offertory of the sea. The bird
that called so raucously at daybreak, the unfurled
leaves splayed out across the skyline of many springs,
fall back now upon the bare bones of things.
Fleshed still, vivid still, encumbered,
I sift them out, from a muddled world
of claws and tarry strings.
 

Stella Davis

in collection Lunch on a Green Ledge, 2023, Stairwell Books,
ISBN 978-1-913432-60-7;
poem incorporated into a seascape by Ben Gough

 
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From Chantry

The lane from the Chantry
slathers up for the season,
closes its wintry way
on all but the booted,
the sure-footed, those
with a reason for going
as the crow flies.
 
The crow does not fly, but hangs
from the gamekeeper’s gibbet,
sleeper’s peripheral nightmare
of beaks and claws.
Under the mud
runs the living briar,
flourishing of thorn.
 
At the little door, a cast
of dwindled sorrows.
Under the floor,
two dozen lasts. Once wide,
the way from the Chantry holds
its narrow secret,
buried forlorn.
 
Darkness, cloud-night, inky
from hall to cottage. The old woman
turns confidential: “My grandfather
had an affair with Miss Young.
There was a child.”
Stares at me, with my cousin’s
bright black eyes.
 

Stella Davis

in collection Lunch on a Green Ledge, 2023, Stairwell Books,
ISBN 978-1-913432-60-7

 
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Night Light

Third night of frost. The hunters’ moon
straddles the valley like an overlord
who means seigneurial business.
The field’s laid bare, each rimy blade of it
for footsteps to blacken and spoil; each tree
flickers with ashy light along the bough.
The copse lies secretive, a gelid cradle.
 
Late, late: the star that appeared and hung
under the moon like a harlequin’s tear-drop
has sunk down into the land behind the hill.
Then lively, instant, I think of the jovial
wordless boy, who grew up sombre, and now
is lost to all beauty, vanished from the earth
which lies about me, infinitely cold.
 

Stella Davis

in collection Lunch on a Green Ledge, 2023, Stairwell Books,
ISBN 978-1-913432-60-7

 
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Lunch on a green ledge

Lunch on a green ledge
bikes sculpted to a standstill
Red Admirals on the hawkbit
Toller Fratrum a blur across the valley
of the hidden Hooke. All day
long lanes and heights and hamlets:
Dorset profonde.
                                               It’s not
for everyone, this joyous misreading
of contour lines, brake-trying plunges,
the punishment of knees, and pitying
of poor souls trapped in passing cars,
 
But on unspotted Michaelmas
it fits us like a skin,
like the turf skin, that stretches
hill to folding hill, enfolding
us to its heart, where every spin
of the wheel delivers up
a place of perfect homing.
                                                          You and I
lunching on a green ledge,
stealing a march on heaven.
 

Stella Davis

in collection Lunch on a Green Ledge, 2023, Stairwell Books,
ISBN 978-1-913432-60-7;
poem set to music for soprano/tenor voice by Andrew M. Wilson

 
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