Skinprint

New Poets 4 series (Highly Commended Poetry Club of Australia)

Here are two poems from my first volume of poetry, Skinprint:

From A Ring-Barked Kitchen
Her window looks out to ivory
shrouds, thin naked limbs
  bleachedand beribboned with a
waist of wire, the bite of axe.

The cockatoos are exotic water
lillies on a funeral pyre
of sky flowing branches

her grandfather has ringbarked
her horizon
and salt rusts the blades,
the oar strokes of her pasture.

She will never sail
from her window

and the lillies screech
over the shine of glass.

She is the coffin
and the trees the pall
bearers.

They have
shovelled the grave
with thin crusts of salt.

I peel the fig,

teeth pulling pink

flesh lined with pearl

drop seeds.

I become the plunderer of short-lived

jewels, robbing the parrots

of their pirate profession

noting the ripening plumpness

of other figs

savouring them for a future

as yet uncomissioned

and unripe,

giving a glancing thought

to the blessing that calls

this tree to fruit

and deflects the curse

of a barren branch

an unsharing meshing

of soil and sun and rain.

This is the taste

of blessing

all Mediterranean sweetness

and sandalled Damascus

road,

enough for

travelling sustenance.

© Poems by Lorraine Marwood