Poetry in Lit Up

Stopgap

Free Verse

By via Pexels

In quiet, my favourite poet
makes silence into a sonnet by a heavy hand
(but this idling is a hazard). Take the picker’s basket,
for instance. A harvest of the mind is rich
images, like brick walls the colour
of old marigolds. You think,
This is a butter house. Not because there is sense,
but sense was snatched away again (a bocce ball
tossed out between the lawnmowers).

Pure silence is a fever dream. You can trawl the sky
for words like obdormition or ineffable
but get old men instead, so now
I am stuck on brows that bow
like bowling pins towards their soup
and daughters who gently scoop them up.
No Daddy, not like that. A bee thuds
to erase the rest, a heavy kind
of punctuation.

You want what matters. So do I.
But my cartridge is dog barks, old faery words,
the soundless itchiness of gnats.
If I empty out an ending, it will be a Rorschach kind
of hawthorn. One spill of flowers to smell,
dredging up the brush of fingers
transcribing varicose veins
in search of buried beats
and left like that.