Cassandra Voices

Tag: Jeremy Hughes Cassandra Voices

  • Cuckoo

    Cuckoo

    I fall to Wales
    between barred clouds and slate sea,

    trailing a long day like a banner.
    Coucou, I say, I am from Kinshasa.  

    Cwcw, they say.
    Soft rain rills desert dust from my wings.

    I am not a migrant;
    this is my second home.

    I fathom the woods for dunnocks.
    Zulus call me unokukhukhuza.

    My eye is a universe.
    I quarter the meadows for pipits.

    My eggs hatch their terror like slow bombs.
    More! they megaphone.

    More! is not enough –
    they might swallow their parents whole.  

    They follow white thread stitching black roads to the coast.
    Their hearts’ compasses beat them south:

    Africa Africa Africa.
    The sun scags at their backs like a hawk.

    Forests applaud their arrival.
    Warm rain brooks Wales from their feathers. 

    Cwcw, they say.
    Coucou, I say.

    Feature Image: A chick of the common cuckoo in the nest of a tree pipit

  • Poem: There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris

    There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris

    slinging hammocks of intent between each step,
    hunting unbroken hearts beyond the senses.

    No one knows.
    Rumours breeze like leaves along Boulevard Saint Germain.

    Another takes a table at Le Café Des Arts
    indistinct in clouds of Vogue Bleu.

    No one.  Not even the off-duty gendarme
    whose breath caught in the branches of his lungs

    when he glimpsed its paws’ dry prints
    on Rue De Verneuil after rain.

    A physician at Hôtel-Dieu
    treated a man who claimed the creature styled

    his hair with an upward rough-tongued lick;
    a couple on Pont De Carrousel who swore

    they were undone declaiming love,
    as if their hearts were removed to make one.

    An ophthalmologist looked behind fiery eyes
    the day Notre-Dame succumbed

    to its blood against the sky,
    and the dense fur of melanistic night.

    Feature Image: Denishan Joseph