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Famous Reporter 14

Currajah

 

LUCY DOUGAN

                                                            two poems

---

     Danny at Hathersage

Danny is two at Hathersage

when he first sees

the god in the water.

I scoop and he drinks

sweet as a poddy calf.

 

There should be bread

and petals here too.

I need to make and

unmake something around

the grace of this tableau.

 

Water filling and running

from the rivulet

of my lifeline.

How easy it should be

to let go of this

 

small insistent, slurping vessel,

give him his own life in water.

There's something savage here

as I cup and uncup the colour of nothing

to his chin.

 

The Journey

It was a time for

heads in laps

and the sound of the sea,

my hand on the back of a chair

you would never sit in any more.

 

I was told by the priest

to think of the view,

but there was not one drop

of air or water

that held your name.

 

To come home

and never come home again.

The first touch down,

first tank filled,

first fly-spotted bill-board on the way.

 

My one owned conviction

that you should be here

lost with the flash of each cats-eye.

Governments fall

and the innocent make their pitiful deals

 

with the rich.

As if you held the skein

of the world safe

without my knowing and now

there's only the smell of other men's promises.

 

I'll ask for you

at the small house

you rebuilt room for room:

"She'll know her way when she forgets."

Did you see even then, all the trees

upturned, and me, moving on a vast plain.

---

Lucy Dougan's first book, Memory Shell, was published by Five Islands Press in 1998. She lives in Newcastle.