Scattered Aubade by Gillian Prew

December’s cut, sun-up/
……………….winter’s day-bud.

Snow-bite/
…………….trees an avenue of bones/
…………….their last leaves
……………………..like skin leaving light.

………White,
……………a chain of wings/
………………………..a luminous edge.

Morning-song a ballad of glass.

……………….Silvery,
……………….day breaks

loose and ecstatic –
an open throat of notes/

…………………………………….a ghost.

Choke by Gillian Prew

The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood.
T.S. Eliot

 ..

the hill-line a long bone hiding the sun-spill/ the river thick with muck-blooms/

swell-bellied, strangled by sewage stems the fish swim this garden of graves/ black

the beasts covered in shadows and reborn in mourning/ their visitors are full of

cancer and cold/ birds gather, unnamed/ unfurling their gifts/

 ..

reading the sky I see a flaming bouquet

 ..

grief glows/ the blood is neon, the berries meat/ light is a fist, a snapshot of ruins/ I

have seen the slurry/ here/ catastrophe/ the rain full –  a globe/ one bird with a name,

ten winter swans/ a boatful of people, their flood a luminous milk/

 ..

water, you have become white in your worry

 ..

a chilled flower/ a lacewing/ all the busy variety/ a busking blackbird/ a cat fixed up

by the mystery of her lives/ love laying down her last corpuscle for the land/ and

where is the new language?

 ..

poetry, it is time for your patterns

 ..

the great melt/ the starvelings/ animals folding species by species/ a cage of hens without sons/ a cow sucked to a bag/ the beasts are singing through holes in their throats/

 ..

Earth – a blue light diminishing, a choir of glass/

 ..

(Note: Final version. I do not accept The Establishment’s version)