For breakfast I eat up my vowels, my a e i o u, to which I add from consonants a fricative or two;
After that I move my bowels then write as poets do, and frequently am quite surprised to feel a trill come through.

Wednesday, 4 January 2012

A Railway Stitch

With a clickety-clack we sit untogether
like jazz inharmonics in a syncopated yarn
pulled along the lines of Granny’s knitting needles:
she’s knitting knots of might-have-beens
in each stitch of a pattern she’d once worn
a year before the War when wool was cheaper
than lives unchained, cast-off, unpurled;
before the death of her father drowned
in a field of mud with seeds of bloodied bullets,
and before the now of clickety-clack halt:
another stitch dropped at here and gone station.


First published in The Flea, August 2011 - Broadsheet 18



1 comment:

  1. Beautiful! The rhythm of life in a syncopated yarn - How true that our lives are so "uneven".
    How sad that richness can be taken at the cost of "lives unchained".

    I particularly like:

    "before the death of her father drowned
    in a field of mud with seeds of bloodied bullets,"

    It gives one pause to consider a senseless, violent death as part of the cycle of nature.

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