In the Beginning
Star begins the song
breaking her strings from untimed waiting
agitating the void, calling along
constellations, grazing unknown suns.
Chords gather, surge with the tides, grating,
rattling the shore, breaking into runs
to meet utterance. Now there are words;
mountains, sheep, angel, a story starting like fire
in the wind. ‘Now, now’ sing the birds
in the city’s trees. Something still begins tonight
traversing borders, checkpoints, coiled wire
to the place precisely above you where sound meets light.
Making Room
We all travelled there in our own way,
some on foot, blistered and limping, some on wings
some chauffeured, our piles of luggage coming behind.
Bolivian Chinchilla Rat, almost the last of her kind,
got there early, fearing it would all be over.
Forest Tree, hovered outside until, discovering
that if she bent low, she was there, alongside Laila,
a street-dancer from Rabat. Brown Bird sang,
Joe, a labourer, saw every brick of every house he’d ever made.
There were no surprises, perhaps how young the mother was,
the poverty of the place. It was just that the low light
around the child lit all faces and how, if you knelt down,
there was room to breathe, especially if you were late,
locked up or not actually there at all.
Prime Time
Beside a boarded-up Burger King,
a white pigeon began to sing.
In the aisles of ‘Everything’s a Pound’
two enemies passed –then turned around.
While Krista slept in the bus station,
forgotten stars made a new constellation,
and midnight chimed. Sleepers in the doorways heard
their names and as they stirred,
The Town Hall’s lions spread stone wings,
three homeless men appeared as kings,
and a sail unfurled in the waiting skip
which cleaved through The Square as a blazing ship,
a child at the helm. Women of the night wrote on the prow
‘We name this ship the Here and Now’.
Ruth Shelton
Ruth has asked us to acknowledge Palewell Press where these three poems were part of a collection published in 2023 called Starwise which is available from their website palewellpress.co.uk