2nd Sat Strollers

By AndrewDBurns

our conspiracy of flightlessness

The pictured (2016) Selected Poems of Michael Symmons Roberts is really worth seeking out ...

... here's another of my favourites from within:


Grounded

I

At the edge of sleep,
my head on your breast,
I hear your heart lock
with the cloth pulse

of a skein of geese,
which arrows over roofs
towards the source
of water, dreams, oblivion.

II

Asleep on your front,
your shoulder-blades reveal
themselves as wing-stumps.

Now I know what you
have given up for me,
for this November night,

this moonlit bed,
this sluicing rain
these distant fireworks.

And I think of migrants
on the wing for weeks,
filleting the air with sleep.

III

Today huge tethered kites
- torsos, mermaids, lizards, bears -
were animated by sea air,
as though the next world hung
above us like a mezzanine.

Tonight, I lie awake and run
your absence through my fingers:
here's the touch of you,
your warmth and give,
our conspiracy of flightlessness.

---

Michael Symmons Roberts (1963 - )

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