Wanting To Be In The Old Tongue, by pd lyons/ Eleutheria: The Scottish Poetry Review (3. September. 2008)

Wanting To Be In The Old Tongue

words
someday
someone
might say to you
unimportant memories
aroused to beauty non-the-less
like cobwebs beaded up with dew
brass fittings on a cedar door

The days debris randomly swept into a banked up fire
before to your own black iron bed you’d slowly go.

w/all our coming and our going
will we ever meet again?
fragile as the moth is the flame
one slight breath
and darkness has us all.
w/that in mind, I mind no dancer
let us join whatever way we can
before the waiting darkness
makes us all fall down.

clumsy fingers
held her own heavy breast skyward
as if the moon
areola hungry for communion
wouldn’t have found her
without guidance

gentle at the end of the world
even rocks all soft
and buds
and lilac silver slanting sun
and when the gem like green rolls down
to meet the slate blue sea
rippled with gently disappearing pearls?

 

somewhere we still know women who paint the things we see in dreams

wanting to be in the old tongue
January crows gather.
from the eviction house
another row of slate slips.
sun orange fingers
poke dark shy pillows,
disturbing bread crumb dreams,
little red breast birds.

Shouldn’t you be left alone,
cradled in the earth for another thousand years or so?
Discovered as some tantalizing source
of artefactual speculation :
those marks –
true cause of death,
or left by some postmortem carnivore?
Perhaps sacrificial ritual,
signs still legible,
though fading as if
some water colour in reverse
until only bare bleached paper
slightly stained .

ghost steps
my warm eastern mouth nourishes,
my amniotic fingers curl,
a personal history
noted, as if by some distant observer.
silver images
swirled into tight sips
almost impossible to savour.

between the posts at midnight
a long wire of electricity
calls little bits of rusting iron
to lantern the siesta heart a way

 

 

this conglomeration was  published by the on-line journal Eleutheria: The Scottish Poetry Review on 3 September 2008. . I cannot find a working link to it nor archives – which is a shame. They were very kind to me and many other deserving writers. I have corrected several spelling errors from the originally published piece.