There has to be an Afterlife
There has to be an afterlife, since matter Can neither be created or destroyed. So, fear not, you’ll continue.…
Return to Work
You: perched in an ivory pulpit, a shrew in wire-rimmed glasses. Me: bound to an office chair, a spaniel…
Tiger Head Sonnets
XVIII My grandfather searches for flints, for bulb fractures, for shatter marks. A kestrel is rising like smoke over tumuli.…
To the Man
I was a songbird, one of the kind whose name I do not know, plain of plumage but with…
Basra 1958
Three of them boarded the bus rifles pointed aggressively bayonets fixed and furious glinting brightly in the stippled morning…
Mitad del Mundo
The poem is in the form of a letter sent from Ecuador to a loved one, far away. Mitad…
Godhuli (Cowdust)
Beyond the bend there were buffaloes, Cows and a single boy perched, Half-naked, on the back of a buffalo.…
Rain When it Falls on Bracken by Fiona Sampson
Rain when it falls on bracken silkily is like a sea of sounds and you are deep among them…
Disembodied
1. My body carved from abandoned bricks of a ruined temple, ————————————-from minaret-shards of an old mosque, from slate-remnants of…
Nyasi – Grass
After monsoon rains When wind shivers Grass taller than my head undulates like snakes Waves invitingly to travellers To…
Statues Missing Chunks
In the Roman Art wing of who-knows-which museum ancient torsos are on exhibit some of which are missing chunks. Time…
Bread and Salt
The lighthouse was somewhere in the south of his country, that stood unused in the wet smoke that rose from…
Lemons in August
Mineral green Lisbons poised in the desert. I’m watching bees drunk with sun. A blistered leaf. Outside Phoenix, west of…
Whoever is Left to Count the Grain
And measure the rings Do not leave out the xylem Of mingling auras And the sap that adheres Our dream-laden…
The Copulation of Angels
When Milton spoke of the ‘copulation of angels’ And Lear said, ‘Let copulation thrive!’ They were praising the way that…
For Mary, Sotto Voce
Mary Cassatt painted mothers as monuments, well nourished, flourishing with their babies, with themselves, at the bath, in the nursery,…
The Long Passage
The herons of Netherton Woods are standing still to watch the stillness that hangs at the end of their bills.…
I Want to Find Nothing
First, you must get rid of absolutes: Those Sundays you had as a kid When you watched dust oat through…
In The Split Screen of the Heart
What do you say when both here and two hundred ———and twenty latitude degrees away no one lines up on…
New England
From neon-lit cheap motels you hear the plainsong of the highway – the dogs and wolves of the hills,…
October Wood
Some niche: rested in planks with its own electric fingers hovering light to become our hands, caressing a mahogany…