~ Silver Branch series ~
June 2023
Lesley Curwen
Lesley Curwen is a poet, broadcaster and sailor who lives with her husband in Plymouth, Devon. She often writes about loss and rescue, about the unthinking damage caused by modern lifestyles, and how being close to the sea (in mind or body) can help salve our hurts.
She is often on Twitter as @elcurwen. She blogs about poetry, and features other poets’ work on her website. http://www.lesleycurwenpoet.com/
Her poems have found homes in anthologies from Black Bough, Broken Sleep and Arachne Press. Nine Pens have published a collaborative pamphlet ‘Invisible Continents’, written by Lesley and two poet -friends from Greenwich Poetry Workshop, Jane R. Rogers and Tahmina Maula.
Lesley was a finalist in the 2023 Poetry Wales competition.
She is joint winner of the Hedgehog Press Debut Collection competition. Her collection ‘Recovery Attempt’ will be published in 2024.
Lesley used to present business news on BBC Radio’s Today programme and also on BBC TV, and has won awards for her reporting on medical and investigative programmes.
Incandescence
a rain of stars flies towards tomorrow
illuminating heart’s red soil
blackbird blows reveille in night’s ear
dawn has rolled the sea away from land
hedges wave a continent of blossom
poplars rustle ballads to the light
stratospheric winds sketch paisley patterns
smacking boats through blue-dazzle deep
morning-fire ignites the world to rapture
conjured by galactic alchemy
Shortlisted for the Dai Fry Award and featured in Sun-Tipped Pillars of Our Hearts
Unforeseen
Retinal flash of cobalt, kohl and gilt
stabs living irises in Theban air.
Oxygen sucks the resurrection hole
whose air slept mute, unbreathed
for three millennia, dark as Nile-fed
earth and motionless. No prophecy
from moon-god Thoth could ever scry
this all too vivid afterlife of popping
bulbs, theft and sacrilege.
From Black Bough's Tutankhamun: Wonderful Things
British Museum, 1972
Gold and lapis cartoon face starred
its gaze on pilgrim crowds aching
to catch a sultry dark-flick eye
and I a single scale in cobra-queue
slid by your placid mask, wondered
why your name meant ‘perfect of life’
when your spine had a twist like mine.
Note: Tutankhamun’s mummifed body showed evidence of scoliosis
From Black Bough's Tutankhamun: Wonderful Things
Jack Frost’s path
Pick a leaf from tinsel hordes.
A crust of diamonds over flame.
Drink the scintillating flare
of trillion octahedra.
Hold it long enough: how
sharpness founders. Crystal
fades to sheen, twinkle
thaws to dank. Star’s work.
Letter of wishes
Let the seeds in the bread in my gut
burst through skin and soil to the sky.
Make me a haven of fecund rot
for the tendrils of weeds to climb.
My bones, a scaffold of growth.
Let every cell of my meat spill
mineral sap into frazzled loam.
Make me a home for diligent germs
who pillage our essence for good.
My heart, a substrate for love.
Piccadilly Radio car park 1984
Windscreens were solid sheets of guano, wipers glued.
Flocks lit on rooftop parks to broadcast their
white noise and crap. Even Manchester rain was not
enough. It took elbow grease to scrub screens clear.
Yet they were beautiful, a multitude of luminous
feathers strobing green/blue in sodium glare.
Their dirty magic transformed charmless roofs,
their thousand bird-hearts warming city air.
Star-spun
Light climbs a skein
of spider silk,
gold flying up
to treetop height
like flicked flash
of dragonfly.
A photon trick
betrays this
thinnest strand,
this toughest line
of all whose anchors
fool our eyes.
Illumination
Scarlet striped lighthouse
punctuates a blue as fierce
as wolf-eye. And the width of it
dazzling, oh dazzling, as stars,
a galaxy of blue shot through
with white. And colour, colour sings
in veins, tickles throats with strange
lust to drink the rolling ocean dry.
Published in Black Bough's online edition Sound and Vision.
Nightsail
Glittersplash here they fly.
At harbour's mouth
fins slap, slide under bow,
heart flips
in silly joy.
Each small body aloft
a new word written on the sky.
Talisman
A constellation of crystal tumblers strobes.
Each glass brimful of seabrine, dim as clouds
propped in occult circle at whose crux a box
sits, anchorshaped, a dovetailed masterpiece
of joiner’s art whose fulgent hinge and key
blaze gold to iris. She conjures this room,
fastness of life’s salt, ship’s locker of her heart.
How to find a jay
Walk into a wood so full of light and leaf it doesn’t matter
if you do not see a bird. Forget about the bird.
Remember the one who used to love jays
who watched for them with you in this place
who walked her ailing dog along this track
who held your arm in the latter days
who hoped for a sign of something
wonderful.
And when you think of her
your eyes will catch
a flash of
blue.
Little Langdale
On scree, turf, stout hill-bone family lay-lines wave and burn.
Each crag, cairn and passing-place
radiates significance.
Absence squats on bench-like stones that bear the ring
of flask and cup, exude a spectral fume of sock
steamed free from hobnail boot.
Walk this mountain, you disrupt ten thousand intersecting tracks
made holy by those you never knew and yet
are kin who if you crossed
their path might hold your hand to jump a tricky ford
might laugh the sun to shame when both of you
fall in.
Winter reflection
after Julia Copus
It was a dark day and there was no way
to tell you what I felt. I longed to
take you into the leafless woods,
your face shining at me. I could not.
Your face shining at me. I could not
take you into the leafless woods
to tell you what I felt. I longed to.
It was a dark day and there was no way.
Millers
Wind ran away with the sky,
swung shadows like scythes.
Grains smashed to powder,
sails whipped & screamed
wheeling on fragile pivots,
canvas blown flat as fens.
A gale will turn these vanes
into miller’s guillotines.
in Black Bough’s Christmas edition 2022
Sirena, the mermaid
Her shape is a wineglass drawn in water,
thoroughbred lines, a full-hipped stern,
discreet curve forward to narrow bow.
Amid-ships, a golden mast.
Below, a paradise of old teak glows
the shade of conkers pocket-rubbed.
Look up from the helm, see living sails
blown tight. Smacked by southerly gust
she beats like a soul through summer sky.
Ritual for loss
I will carry the still bee whose small heart beat under crushed wings
whose narrow proboscis reached into the honeywater I offered her
whose body I shaded from sun, whose last hour of nectar-work was
done, whose eyes saw nothing of my giant’s hands, whose body
I will bear on a cardboard bier to a small depression in wet earth
where I will sow her like a seed and say the De Profundis prayer
my grandmother always murmured when she saw a hearse
Dragon fire on the M5
Tail lights are blazed arterial red.
We gaze at bright hypnotic tint
feast on lumens’ scarlet hearts
touch brakes at every strident wink.
Queued uphill they build a dragon
whose scales are salt-slick with blood
whose swift and smoky progress sets
a flame to every thing we love.
It is the moment when
the sea bites my fingers numb
the arrow of my stroke is ice-tipped
as if winter hidden in the Sound’s depths
has stretched its tentacles to suck my hands
and I remember
warm Novembers are not the norm
planetary tilt is still assured
seasons still hold, cold is good and
ocean calms a soul in flame
danger of breakers
salt crystals line lashes
ozone bemuses lungs
hair coils to frizz
beware transmutation by air and spring tide
sea will throw your soul to the south wind
roll you to unlooked for destinations hold
you alone and shivering in primeval dawn
smash you to skeletal parts and fold
you in her frozen arms to prove you are
alive
all boundaries lost
only skin
divides you from gulfs of flashing wet
float on ocean’s breast let your self go
"I hope my writing can show the fierce, breathless beauty of the world, and also the poignant losses it suffers from neglect and exploitation. I want to use my poetry mind to interpret the dirty truths that I learned as a business reporter.
And I try to write about the kind of crises that affected my family, through forced adoption, mental illness and coercive control, as a way to witness and make sense of those happenings."
Lesley Curwen
