National Poetry Day 2012

It’s that time of year again when the poets emerge from their dishevelled hovels to grace the human world with their words. Yep, the 4^th of October is National Poetry Day in the good old UK, and the theme this year is “Stars”.

I’ll be reading to the kiddywinks of Wester Hailes Education Centre (The High School) with this theme in mind as they take up the solar-reins and study “space” in their science classes. Unless you happen to be one of these delightful child-folk then you can’t come, but here are a couple of “star” themed poems from my fat and flailing hands to whet your pipe.

Breathing Space

Stars, don’t start.

Leave me to everything.

Burn away. Your glimmers

have made their point

though it’s lost.

Let me freewheel

in your distant light,

handstanding, vaulting

through the folds

of your surveillance.

If we’d wanted to see you

every minute of every night

we’d not have built houses,

built factories to drab your sky.

This is our canopy, our cloth

between your vastness

and the immediate universe

of our eyes.

Ghazal Jigsaw

From the small, closed window by our study table the stars are set

like the pieces of your space jigsaw. I ask if you’re any closer. The stars are set

you mutter as you slot another nook into the realised corner, and yet

you seem unsure which cosmos you’ve just pieced together. The stars are set

upon like foxes: your hands are hungry dogs. Your eyes are ready trumpets.

Your mind is a horse and then aha, you’ve a northern glow and the stars are set

in their place with a satisfactory click. Another, two more and you’re a puzzle-rocket.

They look so still and steady with you, but through our study window the stars are set

in more dimension than just those two. You drop a red dwarf and I reach to grab it.

You continue. I open the window and, like the sails of a ship, the stars are set.

Russell Jones