4. Silverskin

tiny white flowers grow in the gash

of a silver birch, tendons split between the reaching

of roots which traverse upwards over old scars,

towards a branch shadowed with grey

and flaking skin.

leaves fall from origami twists

into the lap of a prince who, as an old man,

sits beneath this tree to confess his years into the quiet

of summer: loves, lives, losses

and a lingering thought

that his name means nothing.

in mornings passed, the prince would climb trees

and wade through the froth of sky, searching

for a fortune stories told him he’d find in the heights

of life. he’s a man with eyes

as old as the tree he sits beneath,

only he doesn’t look,

he breathes.

but this tree misses youth, too, and if it had eyes

it would gaze at each new shoot – green as eve

– with wonder. silver skin peels like the scales of armour

or notes on battle for excited archaeologists.

but beneath it all are the wounds

of old men, old crowns, and old hearts,

and a thousand rings of silver dust.

3. Painted Caves

There’s something about painting caves

people don’t seem to remember

nowadays. Secrets in the dark press history through stone,

absorbing moments, loves, cultures — feeding

them back to us with the seep of minerals

in a trickle of ancient water about our feet,

and back into a world that has moved on.

The red walls have a strange glow

when you think of the hands that crushed each berry,

moulded the paste, the paint, with fingers and bones,

and carved an image in the gloom.

Firelight, flickering.

A deer might fly inside a cave,

a hunter might throw his spear and watch it sail

for a millennia (or longer), a woman washes and cooks,

waiting for love, birds are grounded

like shadows tangled to their makers,

and even the sun can set in the north, frozen

there, as if to prove it can.

Rocks furred with moss clench at the tide

that tangles itself between the caverns

like drenches of dark hair. Fish and tiny things weave

and pass by the paintings, minds unbent

around their meanings as they’re warbled

with refraction. Slant

figures stoop

and become old,

mirrored alongside younger selves and more

honest smiles, like hoping too hard

dissolves simply being.

2. The Pineapple Trees

In autumn, pineapples fall in the woods

with soft thuds where the dying leaves lay among the needles,

dressed in red and gold to hide their bare bones.

I used to run home at dusk with one in each hand,

grasping at crocodile leaves that had shrunk and changed

by the time I held them before my mother.

My sister is taller than me and sometimes she picks them

too early, and their petal lips flake and fall away;

we take down the summer bunting and spit bitter flesh

(wooden instead of yellow) into the grass, a quarter

-ring is hidden inside for a shortened season.

She’d try to explain how pinecones are different

by putting their corpses near the fire, so they’d open up

and allow their souls to fill with the rain

that patters down our chimney.

Pineapples don’t grow on trees, she told me.

In the October quiet, the leaves fall slower,

revealing their transparency as they melt

into each other: blood and tanned skin,

hanging (barely) in the treetops, a memory of songs

blistering on the threshing floors.

I sit beneath a wintering tree and watch the pineapples

falldecayanddisappear, nature recycling in a second.

My summer dress is stained and sticky with juice

and an empty shell rests in my lap.
Could be a skull or a mask,

in time. Through the branches I see scales falling

in place of leaves, like fruit dragons

shedding their skins.

NaPoWriMo (the proper one this time) and Glass Alchemy

Sooooo, my pre-NaPo failed, as you'll notice if you look back through my posts. I think I got seven out of twenty-eight or something embarrassingly awful like that . . . but this is a new month, a new start, and I'm hoping to achieve more this time round that in February.

My first NaPo was last year, when I was rather bullied into it by a newbie who'd joined about a month earlier and poetry-ised the whole site. I hadn't really done much poetry beforehand, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a go anyway. We shared a thread on one of the writing sites I'm on, and his awesomness made me strive to work harder so I didn't look so . . . rubbishy. :3 But I finished with thirty poems, and that made me happy. :)

This year, I also intend to finish. *crosses fingers*

Also, I'm hoping to post up a couple of reviews (for a TV series and a film) in the next few weeks, too, which is something new. They're probably going to be more discussions though, but heh, technicalities blow.

Anyway, without further ado, my first poem of April:

Glass Alchemy

When I was small and believed in magic,

my father showed me how to make little glass coins

from the white beaches collected in my wellies.

In the mornings, I watched him gather light bulbs

of glowing honey onto a dipper, and shape them

into harvest moons, small as my raincoat buttons.

On the walls he kept a hundred jam jars,

each half-filled with coloured powders, while rings

of wire about their necks fused them to the wallpaper

and stone, like captured palms, ever-holding on.

When he added the colours, they moved

in tiny eddies, like spices trapped inside a marble,

squashed flat. My task was to stamp them

and give them all names and faces.

My mother’s name was Laurel;

I do not remember her face.

In the evenings we’d search for seashells,

insert a coloured coin, and write our names

on their lips, might they sing her voice back to us,

instead of crushing waves.

Our footprints once waded out to sea, searching,

but now I’m older, wiser, no longer believe in whispers,

so I tip the glass coins back into the waves,

returning them to sand and old magics.

I sell back my father’s secret:

that beautiful things smash like bones,

and elixirs make the past grow older,

always unchanged.