The Bait Diggers

If I could live in praxis, like you
– you're so good at it –
I could let this glide away
without wanting.

See the arena
all around us?
Nature is extravagant!

A theatrical union
A transfusion in the sky
hour into hour.

The seabirds are at the
close of the afternoon
loitering and high
Barking over the bait diggers
Soporous lugworms
writhe in pails

Preening rooks decorate the tips
of the trees
that spit branched threads of pitch
upwards into the purple
They belong to evening.

Where are we then?

Promiscuous, the tranquillized sea
embraces the light
and welcomes the darkness.

These enamels
and colours are breathable
and quell
the weather inside.

 

 

The Glass Blowers

First
All night    hot as fever    backs cracking
The girdled stokers heft sand into the furnace
This violence liquefies – It has method.

Next
The glass blowers    blunt and unpolished
toil in the uproar
Metal rods syrup-twist globs of sun
Lung bellows blow out glabrous blisters

Next
Ungloved the sweat vested    stem-puller
stretches tensile stalks to near imperfection
(The precision machine waits formally)
He is from Italy.

Next
Along the line
brittle snouts brutally cracked
Needle keen barbs crunch beneath black clogs.

Last
Gibbous bowls shiver
glacial in the loading bay.

 

 

Grimspound

Weighed down with granite
and collapsed sunsets
The leather men stalk
stilt legs through thick peat
The bitter grass wind blasts
away    history

Crouched in their great stone clocks
Pots of scattering chaff clasped
As the sun slips down their insignificant hills

Slow murmuring
Dry breathing

Stone, Iron, Bronze
Down tools
Down time

They straggle towards the edge
of the land that beckons
Rolling the stone across
Looking back over their shoulders

 

Copyright © Helen Foster, 2004.