Cassandra Voices

Tag: Nicholas Battey poet

  • Poem: Lovely Dead

    Lovely Dead

    If I were to let you go
    who would I show this garden to;
    who would be there to tell me ‘no’
    it’s not enough to say it’s blue

    in June, when echiums greet the bees
    (just as later they give finches seeds)
    and turns yellow in summer sun,
    burns to red with heleniums

    in autumn. I leave their raw
    shaggy stems all through winter now —
    food and shelter for birds and mice,
    hope and remembering too — but more
    for the texture they bring to cold light;
    though to say it’s not enough, I know.

  • Poetry: Nicholas Battey

    Last Breath of Leaves

    Cup a pear, hear it abscise,
    number the days until ripe;
    the river chuckles with swollen pride –
    back to a ditch by six,
    drained away to the scaly, selfish sea.

    At dawn there’s steam across the water,
    a cloud of egrets scuds over;
    old and waiting, mud for water,
    leaves for a last breath
    of wind, tremor, helical free fall –

    after life, lope and leap
    to nattering heaps; then left
    to turn to mull, down horizons sift,
    forgotten shades of ochre,
    lignin nets over rheumy, russet stones.

    Fish the shilletts from their dark homes
    in the deep, brown ocean;
    grateful, cosseting crumbs swirl in,
    close and ready for roots:
    succouring limbs of bulb, corm, meristem.

    Here my mulling days are numbered,
    pride in appearance doomed;
    hares teem across the water,
    while clouds of regrets scud over;
    for I am old and loping after life.