Ah, Dunedin summer days!
At four in the morn the sweet cry of the gull,
The snappy smack of fist on cheekbone as the last revellers chatter and twinkle their way back home,
Backslapping, snappy smacking, gulls crying,
Oh, my Edinburgh days.
And someone who might have been her mother
A middle-aged woman and someone who might have been her mother got out of the lift on the ground floor, turned sharply to their left and got into the one next to it. They did it without looking around, or discussing; they seemed to know what they were doing. But they were dressed as tourists, not as people who worked at the airport. A middle-aged woman and someone who might have been her mother. Well-dressed but not expensively.
G touched the screen of his phone and, on the next floor up, his colleague F waited for the two women to push their trolley out of the lift then shot each of them in the head.
It was a wrong call.
F was pushed sideways in the organisation, but G came close to being asked to leave. It took him two years to climb back up to where he had been, to prove himself reliable, two long years and too many low-level jobs.
Then, two years later, the terrorists who had watched him watching the tourists did what they had been planning to do.
They claimed responsibility in the names of Rosa and Margherita, the two tourists F had killed. A middle-aged woman and her mother.
Volare… Nel blu dipinto di blu…
I carried you inside me and now I carry the weight of your dreams on my shoulders. I shall not buckle. I shall not fall. They will not break me.
Dreams should be weightless, should be weight-free, should lift you up and take you onward, into the blue, into tomorrow. But as I sit and watch you sleep, on your mother’s young shoulders your dreams lie heavy.
And as I walk along the clifftop path, you sit on my shoulders singing Volare. (Sing, mummy, sing.) I can see the mountains of Albania beyond the blue, beyond the sea and the sky. Volare.
Call yourself a poet
I think –
It’s been said before.
No, I –
Really, it has.
Well, what I’m trying to say –
It won’t be new.
If you’d just let me –
You have to make your voice heard.
I really –
You need to say something new, something never said, and you have to say it out loud.
Well –
Out loud. You need to say it –
I love you.
–
I love you.
–
I said, I love you. And that’s never been said before, not by me to you, not here, not now.
Be quiet. Stop now.
Julie on the underground
It had been a while that people had been covering their faces through fear, fear of the new, fear of the unexpected, fear of the consequences. But soon Julie was going to react, to rebel against the blankness.
The noise in her head was of late spring orchids, dried to straw by summer, rustling and whispering underfoot as she walked through the field, up the slope to the cliff top.
She would go to the city and get on the underground train. She’d sit down quietly. The voices would whisper through the static, some inside her head, some inside others’.
She’d sit down quietly then as quietly stand up and take her mask off to show her empty face, the space where her nose had been, and her teeth.
If I lie back on the hot sand and
If I lie back on the hot sand and look at the blank blue sky, there is too much behind the blueness, behind my eyes, for me to make sense of or to write.
I need to walk back across the sand to the shade of the pine trees and pick up a needle or a cone to look at and understand. And then the pattern comes.
I am my past. And an infinity of futures branching away into the possible. My past brought me here, to this shining silver point on which I balance, from which I will stumble on through one, through many, perhaps through all of my futures.
But perhaps I’ll stay lying on the hot sand, under the hot sun, my eyes closed, unable to understand. Perhaps.
I miss you more than words
I miss you more than words, more than music, more than singing.
I miss you more than breathing, more than blood, more than being.
I miss you more than you will ever know, ever dream or ever care.
I miss you now and now forever. I miss you now.
Those times when you look back and wonder what you were thinking
Those times when you look back and wonder what you were thinking. Running through the scrub, I saw a snake coiled on the path ahead of me and thought my reflexes would be quicker. It moved a little as I got nearer, shimmering mirror silver on black. I thought I could just jump over it and, in my mind, I think I saw it flattening itself against the dirt, against the dried red mud, holding itself down to avoid me. At the same time my mind’s eye saw it reaching out to strike me in slow motion and saw me twist and lift my leg so that it missed. Two views already and both successful.
Those times when you look back and wonder what you were thinking. I’m not sure where I was when my body or my deepest brain screamed to stop. Perhaps I was already in the air, perhaps a stride short. My body twisted and lifted both legs and both arms and twisted on itself and through the screaming felt the bite.
Those times when you look back and wonder what you were thinking.
The birdwatcher sings
Regrets? I’ve had a few.
Rug rats? I’ve not had any.
Egrets? I’ve seen a few.
But love? But love?
But love?
Going for Gone
From the sun to the shade
From the shadow to the grave
From the grave to the shade
I follow you.
Who am I?
simonsalento 