3 poems by Maxine Rose Munro : “This, my most honest of poems”, “Babel”, & “On a hillside,”

This, my most honest of poems

I wish I was like you, not
as simile but as metaphor
– as an 'I am' type thing. 

Not because of your tall
which juts above my short
when I am juxtaposed with you.

I will not compare and contrast
our hair, noses, mouths, your hands
that enclose mine.

I'm satisfied with my physical body:
all that's lumpy, scraggy, wobbly,
and, yes, even my strange, way too-long toes.

But I envy you your emotions,
the way your head and heart hear
what each has to say.

Never does one drown out the other,
or sulk in silence. You always say
only what you mean.

And you mean everything
with the words you use.
You are perfectly composed.

Like I made this poem to be,
like I myself want to be
but never am.


Babel

I watch them skim, lizards
almost the colour of my mother's panstik,
twitch-jerk among crumbled dirt

also shaded lizard. The lizards look
and move unlike anything I've seen. Fast,
faster than the eye can measure,

but still it seems in my grasp
to speak with them, as if we could
commune as one,

shared ancestry loosening our tongues,
letting us laugh together, swop tales
of differing views of a same world.

Later, my toddler daughter will stumble
into a shelf of milk, a bottle will fall,
tumble to shop floor spilling out everything,

and I will be unable
to make myself understood
to the French shopkeeper.

On a hillside,

bed-time approaching, a child sits
in a garden deep inside of memory,
loans me her ears. I hear

sea waves that come
                                               and go,

a bumble bee I know is tied to there
and then, but its toilsome droning
could be any other bee
                                                   just to listen to it,

and echoes, there are echoes

for every sound

             there's another
                                 just behind it/slightly
                                      overlapping it,


boys in dinghies ahoy to each other
                                   hear themselves answer
before they're prepared

a heart beats twice          breath goes in
                                                                  and out


a gull's cry sounds so close           just over there
then   

there, it stretches back out to its own echo,

nothing ever ends,

the tide turns again, echoes
are calling me home.


Bio: Maxine Rose Munro is a Shetlander adrift on the outskirts of Glasgow. She writes in both English and her native Shetlandic Scots, and is widely published in the UK and beyond, both
in print and online, including in Acumen; Ink, Sweat and Tears; and Southlight. Find her here
www.maxinerosemunro.com


2 poems by Maxine Rose Munro in Fevers of the Mind Poets of 2020