Ros Brackenbury
If you could see the track-ways of lips,
hands, bodies, trajectories drawn
by decades of desire, we would all
walk striped as zebras, spotted as
leopards blending into jungle shades
wearing our skins as charts
our loves have drawn on us
highways
and small pathways of adventurous
touch, cross-roads, meeting-places
where our different lovers
have blazed their trail
like dark maps marked
with clusters of electricity
the world at night photographed
from space
we would go illuminated
as Christmas trees, bearing
cross-fires of lightning strikes,
star-burst scars of the great
conflagrations
on reading Mahmoud Darwich
A poet who died
still loving it all, a poet
my age exactly, who died this year
on a table in a hospital in Texas
while they were jump-starting
his heart;
he said in the end that poetry
changes nothing in the world,
only poetry. But poetry, he told me,
is everything: your country,
your loves, your coffee cup,
the color of almond blossom,
the indelible touch of a lover,
the sky at the end of your street.
And then his heart gave out,
that tender muscle: it was poetry,
needed a lighter touch.
He said, all sleepers are babies,
in our sleep we become young again.
I watch you sleep, then ardent upon the stairs,
going down fast like a young man,
carrying your fragile heart out into the street
like a blown rose.
The world can’t see us.
We are too old to be noticed:
nobody watches us pass.
The nearly old live cloaked in privacy.
A man and woman old enough to be
grandparents. A poet who died
broken hearted and joyful.
Alone again in a corner of a café,
invisible, crazy with joy. Oh, the taste
of coffee! The sunlight
of this morning, this one day,
Sunday, when the dancers are all
out in the street;
what can I say but that it’s huge,
the joy of the nearly old.
