Guest Poems

Perigee

I have been looking to the East
where they tell you everything
is illusion, nothing lasts.

The night of the strawberry moon,
though I saw it, I was shuttered
in a windowless room.

I saw you standing in a field
with your back to that glowing moon
among grasses, clovers and orchids.

You were looking in my direction,
the gift of love in your eyes.
It felt like you’d been there forever.

How close you have come in your orbit.
I asked myself what had I done
in my life to deserve this.

And though it was my imagining
I knew everything to be just
as it seemed. I had no doubt of it.

And no wish for it to be otherwise –
the moon’s ancient light, your smile,
the grasses brushing our thighs.

Plotting Doggerland

There are farms you reveal as our plane slides
towards Amsterdam. An ex-navy surveyor
of forgotten seafloor, you have seen
this obscure bombscape drilled into neolithic

geography. Using a digital weather-eye,
submersible and deep dive, you sometimes
– you say – rub sludge to pluck bombs
factory fresh if they are German;

sometimes decay. The uncertain degraded explosive
shares the shoal path in mounds
maybe farmstead midden, eggshell,
antler in the missing oak tree.

At the clearing where once grain was cut soon
mills can farm the air again; it is all
a matter of looking and finding spent explosions.
Were we at the academy together?

A rhetorical question just like
where and when does Europe end?
And why can’t another harvest be
threshed in some untraced shortcut alley.