Golden Scoundrel

poems ode to Hare

Scoundrel (ode to Hare)

Gilt arse flicker
Jig-Foot, Shake-The-Heart 
I tremble, struck like a copper bowl
In this unending day.

That golden scoundrel
left me quiet on the road
with the hoards of roe,
their pelts black, 
remembering a new night
comes.

My car is a red nothing 
in this landscape.

Did they dance on the tarmac, 
bright hooves frenzied?
Pull each other into 
the spring quickening?
Yes, yes, I think so.

And my car, disco lights 
blaring into sweet-as-caramel eyes
like a fog horn.

At the edge of the road
a ditch waits like a grave.
Spears of grass already mourn.

Thank the brilliant bodied hare
and his warning-light tail
flick-booking through elephant footed beech.

Thanks to him for thirty 
lives, and thirty more.

(first published in Icarus Magazine)

(a painting from a few years ago that has now gone totally AWOL - suspect this hare danced away into the wild yonder!)

How We Hurt 

Twice I look up and the hare is crossing the field. 
It leaves no mark on the furrowed land. 
That long limbed lope gives weight to my body as I watch,
its weightlessness describes ´other´ like a charm. 

A blackbird pauses, and when the sobs die down, 
opens up sweetness to sing sleep in.

I see the hare, in the centre of the ready soil
it leaps, and as if the evening sky enters it 
we are left with night´s heft.

Where is the dark but heavy in our arms? 
A soft bodied lover that
we spill our grief into.

(first published in As Above So Below)

(a few hares I painted a few years ago - all sold now)

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