Helen Calcutt

Four Poems

 

 

Spider Sonnet

She spins and sails from the crack
Her spine for elongation. How she longs
To touch spirit of the finger in fore-glance
And ease

A nakedness of lucidity – hold
This waterlike flight between windows
See her thread stretches
A distance longer than here to the hills, and could weave dusk

Of each she marks a new height. And her little deaths
Come painfully to the form
Of a lash between glances.
Her glance

The blood between fingers.
The spindle ash whose elements after falling rise.

 

 

paws and hooves and leaves, oh my

they made it, despite the wind’s drift
to a loss upon the moor line’s teetering rainward
it comes and there is no stopping it

listen

by the winter ledge the wings of a white bird are opening

as to an idea. it is not so often the trees stand and smoke their snows
and allow the water

slowly in under theirs hats, down
the holes in their soles the droplets make round
prints in the snow, letting go

among the paws and hooves and leaves, oh my

 

Lulworth Dark

Balloons are not so beautiful
Or dark
As the night here and its shadow ornaments.
Everything is tilted towards the sea

What speaks in tongues
Pervades what speaks, and talks over it.
The spoon moon indicates
Where the surf will tide

Where the surf will find touch
On star. This black space is comforting.
Like the sea it urges a stillness
In light, of what has all already slipped by. It is a closing

As palm to the palm of sky, turns
Easterly. Like a gesture bearing me that way.
Near the cliffs, two gulls
Drop and dive. Or two sheets

That bend and flutter
Take the wind and inform a soul, it is lost.
 

 

Lady Lucia

Nibble. What else is there to do?
My egg shell, my baby delicate -
You have a place to hide, it is here
Under my lip, and once a year
You kiss it. The last of yours
Going with the season

My little thrill. My thumb-blood seed
Blushing all over like roses.
Winter flower, to last and out last
Your paper wings, the wind’s
Lady Lantern -

O’, thimble of silence
Going in the mind like crickets.

 

 

 

Helen Calcutt is a poet/writer currently based in Birmingham UK. Her website is at http://helencalcutt.com.