At the suggestion of one of our favourite morphrog poets, we include in morphrog24 a single document with all the poems and translations included in this issue. You can just scroll down the page and read it all in one go. To find a list of links to the individual poets, and to read their biographical details, please click here:
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POEMS BY DAVID OLSEN
This is not about Mickey Mouse ™
and his big round ears, three-fingered hands,
little-girl voice, partial nudity, and yellow clogs.
No. This is not about Mickey Mouse ™.
If it were, some dark night I would hear
a knock on the door at 3, and Disney’s thugs
would rouse me out of bed, cover my head
with a hood, dump me in the back of a van,
and drag me to a dank basement somewhere.
They would shine a bright light in my face,
inflict upon me unspeakable horrors,
and deprive me of sleep – all in defence
of wholesome family entertainment.
© David Olsen
Thirteen Algonquin Moons
Wolf howls in the winter wind.
Snow glistens in a crystalline sky.
Worm awakens stirring in the earth.
Pink summons colour to grey land.
Flower blooms before the stars.
Strawberry sweetens flesh.
Buck dominates the rut.
Sturgeon sheens silver waters.
Harvest gathers the year’s yield.
Hunter presides over the kill.
Beaver shelters against the chill.
Cold opposes the early dark.
Blue rises over an arbitrary calendar.
© David Olsen
Divertimento
Stockholm to Birka
Aboard the ferry
to the Viking village,
as if in a concert hall,
for two hours
I’ve nothing else to do.
The wind’s a stave
of measured time,
and I’m entwined
between a legato wake
and a diesel’s thrumming bass.
A granite glissando
scores the edge of each
islet in this archipelago;
an arpeggio of pines
lines every horizon.
Above, a chorus
of cumulus shape-shifts
like the borders of Poland.
Shimmering wisps
of cirrus are silver flutes.
For two hours
I’ve nothing to do
but immerse myself
in the muted harmonies
of this cloud concerto.
© David Olsen
PROSE BY IAN C. SMITH
Gridlocked
Immersing old aches in my steaming bath solving a giant crossword, I come across JFK and his PT boat, jacquescousteau plunging down, down, even a coracle, and a water-filled ditch surrounding a castle, but no sign of Shelley among fathomable opportunities. A lake in Whitman’s Passage to India? Tahoe seems more film noir.
I ignore my phone interrupting the affirmative Molly Bloom, like clues about writers, artists, characters, trying not to waterlog them. The Brontes are here, my glasses becoming a Haworth of fog. Scipio struts in from 202 BC, and I don’t flag, filling in an Aussie actor originally a comedian. Don Quixote is simple. Auden, Diaghilev, and Sylvia Plath, appear, then James Dean in the appropriate sized puzzle. Good old Vladimir and Estragon move me along, oddly. Bedevilled by dodgy memory, I am also abetted by Faust.
A clue about a mystery musicologist, moniker Ebenezer, drifts thoughts towards Christmas, and wonderfully obsolete names. Filling in Bolero its earworm threatens to unravel me. Soaring around the world in eighty minutes, Europa leads to Zagreb, but African capitals are a weakness. One tricky answer, extramural, could describe me. I almost splash the page again when Charybdis fits after I flounder, all at sea, brain whirling dizzyingly.
Like life, crossword difficulty eases somewhat towards the end, but is tough to complete. I know nothing about pinball machines, religious jurisdictions, or leaders of the Helvetians, stubborn unanswerables spelling failure. I biro in Femme fatale?’s answer, Bette Davis spot on about old age being no place for sissies. Were she alive, she would probably rasp a ready witticism about becoming a puzzle answer. Requiem seems a fitting end. Well, it’s your funeral, Mozart, I think, skin wrinkling. It was to begin with. If I am not cheating.
© Ian C. Smith
POEMS BY ION CORCOS
In this Town
Mat at the door, glass lamp on a wooden table,
and a painting of flowers. The slim mirror on the wall
is stubborn, and the street is quiet: the deceit.
In Chagall’s Over the Town there is no betrayal.
At the train platform in Woodley, two swifts,
a stone bridge, and the railway tracks to Hyde.
A few trees, steam drift from a red building.
We are the only passengers in our carriage.
In the kitchen, where we are temporarily staying,
a window looks out to a small conservatory,
the garden, two rusted chairs,
and an uncomplicated hedgehog burrow.
We clean doorknobs, food packets, the tabletop.
The orange preserve is a stumbling translation;
nothing will ever, ever, ever be the same again.
All Chagall painted was love, nothing more;
it was not a symbol of insistence.
The tulips are about to bloom, all passing,
and there are small buds in some of the trees.
A bee frets at the window; it cannot enter.
We stay in our own perimeter, incarcerated;
some do not have a home to go back to.
To watch for wild dogs in a pine forest,
to be desolate: never having seen Chagall’s painting,
tasted a rambutan, or forgotten oneself for a time.
© Ion Corcos
An Astrological Munificence
I take the path in pieces, the rough side of a shell,
resolute sun as obstacle.
You show us the way: derelict houses
on the other side of barbwire fences and overgrown mailboxes,
the slow creep of moors.
On the hills, grass and cows, sheep,
a rutted road, and gates. Signs warning not to stray
onto farms.
At your home, cupboards of old tins,
against a wall, a painting of a quiet Colombian river,
cases of photographs under our bed.
Our stay is longer than you thought;
it is all an irascible lingering, more than your murmur,
the short wall across your door.
The baneful sill in your lounge is covered in dust,
and every afternoon you are cranky.
You lay on your brown leather sofa,
curtains half-drawn; fall asleep.
No bees on lavender flowers, no white butterfly.
I creep into the kitchen, start on dinner;
then we will talk, even laugh,
as I serve another plate of potatoes and carrots,
alongside a ready-made vegetable pastry.
Maybe if the light didn’t lie spent on the flagstones,
or if we gave you a specific date earlier,
we could have even aligned our stay with the moon
and an astrological chart,
then the last word would have been otherwise.
Instead, the ‘ifs’ were not quite.
Still, you waited with us on the train platform,
waved us off; and after six weeks,
sent a message that the last of the flowers we gave you
were just hanging on.
© Ion Corcos
White Shawl
after David Cox’s A Windy Day
You walk along yellow grass,
the sea in the distance; the sky is white,
like the neck of your dog.
The stick you hold is old, as is the cape
around your back.
Two trees on a windy day, bent;
on the beach, a long boat.
You have heard of Crimea,
that it is cold like your home.
You pace against the wind,
a shovel in hard earth;
what you have made of your life is here,
and in the few books
on shelves in your study. No one knows
you have travelled to Rome,
seen the Parthenon, the Black Sea.
You have a limp, your bones brittle.
The damp bites.
When the clouds pass,
maybe you will sit long enough
and a man will come up to you and talk;
you will tell him about your books,
about your red dress,
that you are from Ukraine,
not Russia, that you know your way around
the fenlands of England.
© Ion Corcos
Portrait of a Man
In the morning I put oats in a pot,
add flax and chia seeds, then enough water
to soak. I have a kitchen;
it is not imaginary. I recollect
the wind last night, the crash of lake water
on the shore, the gust on the window.
Sudden winter.
Metal like the grip of cleats
on rocks.
I turn the hotplate on, heat the oats
till the water boils.
I have a table to eat at.
Jackdaws fly over bare trees in flocks.
The wind dries my clothes.
I wash the dishes,
sit on a chair on the balcony.
The afternoon disappears.
A dictionary is not a roof,
or a coot hidden in the reeds of the lake.
A gardener uses a trimmer to mow;
a portrait of a man,
alone. I do not notice the sun
go down,
only orange clouds, and leaves, dead,
strewn on the path.
© Ion Corcos
POEMS BY JENNY HOCKEY
Cycle Ride North
Alnmouth is grey. Not snowing.
And so we set off. Even when you
forget the map, I find one in a shop.
Three days in and we’re old.
Nothing keeps out this drenching ice.
When will I start to cry, slide my bike
in a ditch, cleave to the comfort of mud?
Four days in and we arrive,
expecting a family fanfare, a measure
of hullabaloo. It is as though we’d never
got lost in the fog on the Lammermuir Hills
under eerie giants, the swish, swish, swish
of their blades —
never been greeted by bin bags
held out wide for our shoes and clothes
before a landlord would let us in —
nor squeezed between lorries and verge
for miles up the roaring A1, two spectres
hunched in the spray — bounced
over cobbles to Leith, too wet for a dry café.
Five days in and we wake
to the Edinburgh sun
smiling through the shutters
belatedly.
© Jenny Hockey
Gunnerside Ghyll
and us on a confident bridle path,
alert for a gully the miners once scoured,
hushing for lead, now our descent
to a dormitory bunk tonight.
Map-flapping wind drives us into the ghyll —
but we find no path across and I’m for the road,
the extra four miles, but it’s past three o’clock
and summer’s closing down.
We keep on trying the slope, the sky behind us
leaking light —and then there’s a man
in country green with a large-scale map
who shows us the route ahead
where dregs of sun spill into our eyes
as we clamber over the opposite edge
and can’t stop our feet from jigging and springing,
never knew turf with a bounce like this
all down a snaking path to Keld,
some kind of drug alive in our veins,
to cup after cup of hostel tea, tea like no tea
was ever before, to shepherd’s pie and a warning
of trackless moors to come, possible fog.
We just can’t wait.
© Jenny Hockey
Front Garden
After Gregory Kearns’ ‘Cherry Tree Lane’
2 June, 1953
Bonnie Garwood and me
with my arm round her shoulders,
both of us smiling and plump.
I’m an inverted English rose,
swagged in multiple layers of skirt
to celebrate Her Majesty.
Behind us in the window
a card baptises our house:
DERRYVALE,
a song my Grandad loved.
21 September, 1996
A little landscaped plot
long overgrown, fence gone awry
and someone who’d been Dad
peering across a four-inch chain
bolted to the door.
No-one but me on his case.
15 March, 2018
Nothing shows up on Google
but a tight-lipped frontage
paved over for cars.
© Jenny Hockey
Ashbank
When you arrive you look
at the shoulders of fields
combed right down to the earth,
stare at shadows of clouds on the fells,
clouds like whipped whites of eggs
before the sugar’s spooned in,
watch the forehead of Ingleborough
furrow with pride, sometimes screened
by mist, sometimes a slice of shade,
notice the rickety legs of the foal
working out how to fold down,
how to come to a halt.
When you arrive you look
at cattle planted between three fields,
wonder what stirs them to move —
but stay here a week
and you have it inside.
© Jenny Hockey
POEMS BY PAULINE ROWE
Penance
(15 May, 1980)
I was so dressed up,
made-up, ready to meet
the other witches that night.
There was no rain
though I remember rain. No bus
though I was sure I got there
in time. Miles away, too afraid,
at 16 to phone home for a lift.
I had the taste of red wine in my mouth
like artists in the novels
I read, or the books I dreamed
I would write.
I pictured the broom
fixed to Carol’s wall, imagined
how she made it to Morocco
and back, to cut out
all traces of John,
root and branch.
I’m glad to be alive.
I don’t want to remember.
I don’t wish to say what happened.
I’m sorry I got into the car.
© Pauline Rowe
Drowned in Dust
Half a league from my childhood church.
they raise my unbreathing head,
carry my corpse to the Angel and Elephant.
“You’re too young,” shouts the landlord,
“we’ll lose our licence. Come in.”
The women drinking there are dull with gin.
The medical assistant shakes his head:
“Too late for electricity – she’s dead.”
The women clean my nostrils with soft strips of cloth
leave black rags like tadpoles, blood-clots, tar –
these late ablutions don’t take them far.
The medical assistant raised his hand:
“Does anyone possess a magic wand?”
He shoved a bellows pipe up my nose,
blocked my mouth, tried to inflate my lungs.
Breath, the principal thing to be attended to
was stopped with dust. This dust – your sprinkling,
it turned my lungs to glue. The dust was you.
Life did not appear. The medic lit his briar:
“she is full dead of dust,” he murmured, “little liar.”
It was then they put my body on the fire.
© Pauline Rowe
Bad Dream 5
Sex with Strangers
is a regular inconvenience:
the ones who smell
like the butchers in the precinct
the ones who refuse to wash
or use talc for emergencies
the ones who hold remnants
of food in their teeth
who pee out of the window at dusk –
though I haven’t lived on the fifth floor
for fourteen years –
When I wake up
the shame is like ink
on soft paper
more or less contained
as it spreads slightly, slowly
like a rumour.
© Pauline Rowe
Bad Dream 9
Given my girth, it was awkward
the endeavour to carry my own spare bodies
in thin cases, the machete blunted,
once they were filleted –
cumbersome layers of flesh
in the leather portmanteau –
designed for authentic sketches
and original works of fine art.
There were gouts of blood
on the weapon’s blade
though I failed to find
compelling evidence of a crime.
I looked but couldn’t see
my bones on the road.
I heard the laughter of corvids
behind the box hedge
and the shrill scream of a cat
in our reclusive neighbour’s yard.
© Pauline Rowe
POEM BY JOE BALAZ
TELLING IT LIKE IT IS
“Might as well dress up like wun deer
and run in front of wun mountain lion.
Same smell. Same station. Same result.”
Dose wuz da comments
addressed to da television
dat we wuz looking at
in da living room.
Ronald had moa to say too
while we watched da news
about da teenage girl
dat had her leg bit off
by wun shark in Australia.
He continued
wit wun deadpan expression,
“Dere watah. Dere rules,”
as we wuz informed
how da young person
wen bleed to death
and die on da beach.
Blunt and unfeeling
is wat some people would say
but Ronald
wuz just telling it like it is.
Even his cruel joke
kinnah summed it up
on how he viewed
da whole situation—
“Sharks and me
have wun undahstanding.
I stay out of dere ocean.
Dey stay off of my lawn.”
© Joe Balaz
Calvin Liu is an academic specialising in political theories. He taught in Liverpool John Moores University. He writes poems and plays as a way of dialogue with the formal intellectual life. As a Chinese ethnic he’s been in London for 13 years, living in and through the city transliterally.
POEM BY CALVIN LIU
Arrest
Portrait of a Pandemic
It was 8 o’clock in the morning and I woke up in a train station.
I didn’t mean to be there, and I’m still not sure why the hall was partitioned.
Perhaps I wasn’t supposed to go anywhere as I witnessed a sudden death:
A boy was hung where trains were coupled, and his neck was clamped. It ached.
The platform was crowded like a guillotine.
A man with a cheap loudspeaker in his hand was singing,
‘Peace on mothers of the world’,
‘Peace on fathers of the world’.
He had thick lips,
and the boy had no face.
The crowd was growing, as I soon lost sight of the man and the boy.
People photocopied themselves to fill the hall. Police were deployed.
A hoarse spicy voice was yelling: be quick, be quick, and be quick,
I’m in a hurry!
A truck of high school girls were singing A cappella:
‘Peace on mothers’, and ‘peace on fathers’, Ah lalalah.
I don’t know if they were innocent, or indifferent,
until the moment the crowd was all muted with a trench tinkling.
A posh voice ascended,
and it announced amid jelly silence,
‘The singing man has been arrested’, he exclaimed.
The crowd suddenly dissipated, rolling out a wide path to the platform.
A man was taken and tied by the police, deformed,
and he had no face.
© Calvin Liu
POEMS BY YUAN HONGRI, translated by Yuanbing Zhang
Don’t Forget The Other You
Don’t forget the other you,
those numerous yous, either in the body or outer space,
those sweet smiles and the diamond flowers that never wither,
that make boundless years on earth turn into a snippet of bird song.
Yes, the crows of a heavenly Phoenix.
Those sweet lightnings hit you,
let you suddenly wake up and see Gold Heaven is with you.
And your body is the golden body of giants,
and makes all time become sweet.
不要忘了那另一个你
不要忘了那另一个你
那在身体里在天外的众多的你
那甜蜜的笑容永不凋谢的钻石之花
让你在尘世的漫漫岁月化成一声鸟鸣
是的,那是天国鸾凤的啼鸣
那甜蜜的闪电击中了你
让你恍然醒来 看见黄金的天国与你同在
而你的身体是巨人的黄金之体
让一切时光变得甜美
© Yuan Hongri
Translated by Yuanbing Zhang
My Heaven is Inside My Body
My heaven is inside my body,
my heaven is a great many,
like stars in the night sky,
with silver towers,
huge edifices that look like sapphires ,
golden palaces, gardens of crystal.
My body is bigger than the universe,
countless gods and angels are my partners,
as if they are countless myself.
Neither time nor life and death in my words ,
dawn and dusk are the same name,
and sadness and joy are the same words.
我的天国在身体之内
我的天国在身体之内
我的天国居多犹如夜空的繁星
白银的楼阁 蓝宝石的巨厦
黄金的殿堂 水晶的花园
我的身体比宇宙更巨大
无数的天神与天使是我的伙伴
他们仿佛是无数的我自己
我的词语里没有时间也没有生死
黎明与黄昏是同一个名字
而悲伤与欢喜是同一个词语
© Yuan Hongri
Translated by Yuanbing Zhang
POEMS BY MARK CZANIK
Playing blues harp in Stanmore Station
It was a dank, sodium lit underpass
that smelt of urine, overripe fruit,
and childhood passageways, yet it suited me
and the acoustics were good. Every twenty minutes
a train would stop and unload its precious cargo
of commuters, some of whom responded
to the urgency of my need, and left offerings
in the blue Captain’s hat curled at me feet.
Oh, I knew I was no Matt Taylor or Sonny Boy –
an Italian flower-seller at the mouth
of St James once pleaded with me
to leave him in peace.
But for a long time one fugitive siren song
was all I could draw from the vacuum
that had opened up inside me,
and at least it was my heart speaking.
Holner was the black lung through which I breathed
in that far away Big Smoke.
My constant companion, my confidant,
my dummy, my signature, the small change
of my blessings, my means of introduction
and departure, the howling wolf at my door,
often my only escape from the straitjacket of silence
that imprisoned me then.
The missing reed in my voice
I was still learning to play around.
© Mark Czanik
Queen of Orange
How blessed I was to meet you when I did.
Champion of all things orange,
I have so much to thank you for.
For giving me crystals to hang in my window
that cast come and go rainbows on the yellow walls,
and a cigar box painted in Aboriginal colours for my harmonicas,
and leaving that precious copy of Beautiful Losers
on my bed for me to find.
For letting me tag along on your walkabouts
around Op shops, markets, and sweatbox taverns
in that eternal Sydney summer of 1987 –
usually accompanied by Jasmine, your three-legged black Labrador –
and showing me how to do battle with brokenness.
Just getting on a bus with you was an adventure.
You were constantly pointing out people you recognised
in the street, all of whom you celebrated
for some unique talent they possessed
or special place they held in your vast family tree
of really good friends.
It was like travelling with a poor and fabulous,
carefree version of the Queen;
one who cooked me countless miracle meals out of nothing
and shared her wine and relaxments;
who could deliver a nasty pinch with those famous toes
if ever I displeased her or make me blush
like the chosen one whenever she called me a dag.
How many bands and shows did you take me to see
with your mysteriously obtained tickets?
One night it was Elvis Costello. You slept through most of it,
coming to life only after we left.
All the way up George Street you kept stopping passers-by
to tell them I was an illegal immigrant.
I couldn’t stop you no matter how I tried to shush you
or drown you out with my harmonica.
You even came up with a little ditty: ‘Mark’s an illegal immigrant,
his passport’s not so diligent.’ A police car crawled past.
‘Help, I’m being kidnapped by an illegal alien!’ you cried.
‘He wants to be arrested so he can be sent home.
He’s missing his Mum.’
Dear Mandy.
I wasn’t missing anybody when I was with you.
I was too busy trying to stay on my feet
in the Taureanado of your enthusiasms
and dark romantic wit,
the colour education you were giving me
in how best to remove orange juice
from the kitchen floor in the darkest hours
by standing in your bare feet on a towel
and shuffling around with it;
marvelling at the Aladdin’s cave of your room
and the frangipanis you wore in your bunched black hair
long before it became Frida fashionable.
Or just being in awe of your Lust for Life.
What did Iggy Pop know.
Anyway, eventually you lost interest in my embarrassment
and started singing at the top of your voice,
your One Woman Goddess Midnight Choir
as we walked that long unfolding street towards the home
I was lucky enough to be sharing with you.
That night it was ‘Bury me Deep in Love,’
another song I hadn’t heard before.
Which to this day I can’t hear without singing along to.
© Mark Czanik
Poem for Kasamira on her twenty-fourth Birthday
My little berry,
my book-rest and desk sitter,
my sea-girl from Porlock,
my little bundle of joy found stowed away
in the bathroom laundry basket,
my lucky horseshoe, my anchor,
my buttercup sleeping in the little cave
under my chin, my tribal child
I never wanted to put down,
my ribcage on whom I used to play
Beethoven’s 5th, imperfectly, but with great gusto,
my kitchen dancer whirlpool
and list-maker extraordinaire,
my butterfly double marble,
my creaking floorboard,
my slip of home-light under a door,
my blow-in firefly from the forest
of beautiful illusions
upon which my life depends,
my unbroken trail of breadcrumbs
leading me back to where
I no longer need to go,
who is not mine at all,
but a stroke of good lightning,
a thinking tree that knows and owns itself.
My little bandit magician,
still following me through
revolving doors
and coming out first.
© Mark Czanik
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