Foundling
One morning when I woke by the sea so very nearly blue the back of my hands were a wilderness of blue rivers and knuckled mountains and I thought of you and the spring trickling from stone and I began to walk away from the sea so very nearly blue into the kiss of rain towards you and I no sooner got a fix on the blue sky than she shifted over me and the marsh ground gave beneath my shoes and no one I asked knew of you not here or anywhere it seems and I thought I saw you more than once on steps with your duffle bag hand knocking at a door in home after home after home after home your love unpacked itself until it became the same old story and you carved their names into your arm and closed yourself as you would a disappointing book and made yourself unreadable I saw you at a bus station with the duffle bag and then again with your hand held out then asleep beneath a bridge the duffle bag a pillow I called your name and none of you answered and a crowd never gathered with placards to march through Whitehall demanding justice and chant the old-fashioned name someone gave you I found myself at Brunswick Square where you were bundled on the Foundling Wheel and disappeared through a wall with half of a tin broach as a promise that one day it may be redeemed when your mother’s life became a little easier and there she was half a token drawing blood into her palm and in the sea so very nearly blue a crimson cloud and she remembered you.
Footnote: In the 18th Century a Foundling Wheel was a turntable, mothers could place a baby to be deposited through the wall. They would also leave half of a small object as a means of identification in the hope that one day be able to reclaim their child with the other half.
Commissioned for Ricochet (Spineless Wonders, New South Wales Australia) an anthology Co-edited by Cassandra Atherton & Paul Hetherington
New Year
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
James and Jenny pitch messages
up into the dark expanse of night
from the portacabin in their garden.
They’ve an aerial one hundred foot high
and a giant satellite dish on the roof.
In all their years of listening to the stars
they have not received a single blip
of encouragement from their
spectroscopic explorations.
One New Year’s Eve the windows
iced over and disco music drifted in
from a nearby party. Abandoning
their screens, they rushed outside
to dance crazily on the lawn
hoping someone was watching.
One of seven poems commissioned by Salisbury Cathedral, for a performance of Holst’s Planets by John Challenger on the cathedral organ.
Martin Figura