photo from pixabay
Dear Sydney Graham
first published in Wild Court
‘Under your blue hat.’
– W. S. Graham, Dear Bryan Wynter
I My feet wear odd socks today, one of yours, One of mine, see how well they go together. Apologies, I’ve come to your funeral late, Dressed oddly and for a night on the town. II A pint of foaming seawater with Malcolm Mooney, Lent out, for a short while, to fast from death and form A lasting impression. Together We can moon over whatever midnight moonlit furry Queens and meropian mermaidens have set aside their fish Tails and crowns to land in this dive and prop up the bar. Chat them up with old jokes and new famous phrases; A dead man makes a fine wingman. III Hungover, next morning, Still hanging on, at the very end of the land, I go dayfishing. I go dayfishing, and the ghosts come at night. And by day I dream I dream you’ll wash up upon the shore, in alien Whiteness, like some deep sea creature. But I know, Sydney, you’re on the other side of earth. IV There is distance Between us Like the hard space between Pen and paper. V I linger by the swept shoreline and seven seas, Unready for the Eighth Journey you go on. VI The voice breaks The still winter seas crack I hear you Capped beneath blue braes. VII I wear seaweeds and nakedness; I fold your flotsam into me, like ocean floated origami. I drink my own salt tears. Mooney guides the tide in. VIII Damp letters wash up next to my bare feet. The waves have taken their words, but I will be Careful not to tread on them. Ode to Apollo 11 first published in The Seventh Quarry ‘We listen here on earth’ – John Keats, Ode to Apollo Apollo, you give breath to poets, And need none yourself; Far above us, you swallow black. You fire the arrow made of men and steel and challenge. Ten times you have drawn the billion dollar bow And learned from your misses, your Houstonian problems, That the widows of your flyts burden your godhead. You dip your arrows in flames and thunder. As he rose his new-forged armour shone And dimmed the light of hot Hyperion. A splash of adamantine shuttle and white starlight Against the black, Like an inverted printed page. Today, you are lighter than ink, and tree skin; Lighter than breath. Today, you live in the mouth of your priest. He has a white body, and a black face; In his visor’s reflection trace the expectant eyes Of an entire race. He walks the silver sickle shape, Reaps the feast of virgin dust and starlight; Speaks the words the world remembers. He touches the goddess’s skin. It is dry and wisps away at his step. Poets’ god, you create new worlds, Walk the dead orb magnificent in desolation. Apollo, god of poetry, prophecy and moonboots. I Haunt You Back (A Prose Poem Book Review of Surge by Jay Bernard) This poem first was published as one of the winners of the Shortlist Book Review Competition 2020, held in celebration of the Dylan Thomas Prize by Swansea University. It also was part of a sample of prose poem reviews that was commended in the National Centre for Writing’s UEA New Forms Award 2021. Clad in two tragedies / the red tongues squirm / to unobscure the voices crossed out atNew Cross/ to catch and green and dress / the words fallen / from Grenfell heights. / Bernard has sifted through the soot and looted the guilty words / etched in black burn marks – Mark! / The poet comes not with the first responders / feet walk slowly with the burden / of rhyme and trepidation and care / not to disturb the crisp bodies / like Orpheus on a day trip to Pompeii / here to make the stone souls speak. / – Hear! / A new poet has erupted onto the scene / (of the investigation) / these poems are the smoke that spills / from the cleft mountain lip. Inhale the sweet smell of meat / breathe out the sweet sixteen fourteen / the dead languages learned. / They haunt you / you haunt me / I haunt / until we have a legion of ghost children / flyting down Fleet Street / in sheets / that ripple like clear pools disturbed by dreams. Nine Spilt Yolks first published in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal ‘From the speckled hen nine eggs I stole,’ – Dora Sigerson Shorter, The Fairy Changeling I Something I’ll never know Was stolen right out from under my tongue. And in its place I unfurled A soggy paper fairy child. Some scrap of fallen faerie wisdom That babbles like a baby, pretending to be a man, Or a brook, pretending to be a steaming pot, Growing hot upon the hearth. II Paper child, Your infant call keeps me awake all night. I swaddle you in white robes, share in the second sight Of your apposition eyes. Sometimes, I ignore your bawling, Roll over, rest and regret the blank page come morning, When I can no longer see by day’s decaying light Whatever strange and sickle shape you held. Other times, the gift is just a goblin Gobbledegook trick. You laugh and leave me A hex: untranslatable fayerye talk Hoaxed on browning leaves, Curling, like a monument to burnt parchment. III Sometimes, I scrub the muck off of you And you disintegrate In the bathtub As if I’d boiled you with the eggshells. When the dirty tub water transforms into a Naiad’s laughter, It’s easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. IV You’re lucky you weren’t born in a grimmer wooded age, When witches and woodcutters wandered The swallowed, beaten, breadcrumb path; When some rustic rhymer would have gathered Logs, and courage, and poverty’s hungry unnamed Necessity – and thrown you into the flames. Now, more likely, A wastepaper basket – Squash you up squirming And still shrill jabbering With my other aborted litter. Next day, lift you out, Uncrease your little wrinkled body, Hold you up to my loving breast And interrogating eyes. V Infant migrant of Tuatha Dé Danann, The girlish boyish wailing go-between, The child of two worlds. VI Sum of all my days, I waste before Your unending appetite for my life, My thoughts, my loves, my dreams. Sometimes I wear the seams inside Out so you can’t get to me With your suckling screams. Your pudgy pixie hands have an iron grip, But I know you fear the cut of iron scissors And judicious editors. VII Faerie. Even the word does not stay still. Fairye, let me hear The fluid and formal first words that every mother dreads, But every poet longs to hear, the child’s laugh and ancient cheer, For novelty new born upon the earth, brewed and boiled In the grail of an eggshell cup: “I am as ancient as all the woods of the west, And all the painted paper in which I am dressed, But never have I seen or been such a thing before, Though my lean tongue is tired and my hard heels sore.” Your feet tread on eggshells; their crack is your speech. VIII Sometimes, I hear Far away, and half forgotten, The music of a humdrum child kept Beneath a pillared and rising hill. On the shadowed side of some fayre Sidhe, A tithe to hell traded for a leaf of laurel lay Teethes in an inferno’s maw. I know we’re not supposed to have favourites, but I love you more than any weak, wan, womb-born whelp. IX Changeling child, You wear thin; you wear thin pale eggshell skin, A hefty egg-shaped head, and speckled spriggan skin. I clothe you in my own flesh; A babygrow for a baby that will never grow. I have a father’s torn beard, and a mother’s suckled breast, And the papers hate a single parent best. When I’ve tossed you into the fires A little yellow head surfaces, burbles, pops up From a sizzling egg yolk. Julebukking first published in The London Magazine It must terrify you, that words said in a certain way Can tear you from your house. Come and wear goatskin with me. Step with me on the scattered snowflakes; Pentagram shapes weigh down the white world tonight. Hooves leave a hard imprint, a dark wet mark. Hoof-clop like the noise your tongue makes When it leaves the roof of your mouth. I leave a goat’s head on your porch Next to the old broom and car windshield scraper. The Rite of Winter (A Sequel to Le Sacre du Printemps) first published in The Seventh Quarry Part I: The Kiss of the Earth is Rough and Stubbly After the ritual, the girl claws her way out; The dead earth crowns. Her plaited hair tethers her to the split soil Like some vast umbilical. Snaps with a brace of ice. Her bones are twisted wire, barbed, They tug against her skin, compressed, They coil into Springs. Riotous clouds drop torn up notes, scatter snowflakes, To weigh down the world with pentagram shapes. Her feet are light. Her feet are bloody from leaping spheres, Seasons, lifetimes. No girls surface from the river. They split their skulls on the icy skin. Part II: The Sacrificed Through the mirror she sees who she would have been Grown old. Winter’s dance is in snap-thaw jerks, her body Cracks. The Sage was old even in spring, in winter She makes him dance dead feet on hot coals. Often, he treads on his beard, for the boards she trod. Her lover is dead. Yarilo sleeps and next season Will take a new bride. Her spirit is suffused With his spent seed, the last volts of the votive rite. She leaps; she will never touch the ground again. The Siren Star first published in Fly on the Wall Press Magazine On the first day, in the place empty of it, The spaceman cracked his nose Till his visor did the same. On the second, his grieving replacement Sent out to complete the essential maintenance Downed tools Unlatched the white umbilic cord. On the third day, the astronomers with their one wrinkled eyes, And the children given a telescope for their birthdays By parents with too much disposable income And too few ideas, disposed of their sight. On the fourth day, those who lived in overgrown concrete Cities snarled and starved of light unpowered by the spark Of their own invention, stood in the unshadowed fields Looking up. Like a sailor, far from shore, surrounded by nothing And nowhere, they turn their gaze to the horizon To see another sight, to burn away the infinite Fields of grey and green and blue and white. On the fifth day There were no seeing men left. On the sixth, no women. On the seventh, the last man put on his suit And left the station His eyes sealed by the flame from his kitbag. Even then, he was still called to see. The citizens of the sun. Three copper women scarred By the lines of three black holes at their necks Sucking in starlight. Three eyeless women, hair and gowns rippling like flags In an impossible wind. The ends of hard white limbs clotted black. Exposed to empty chaos. She lifted his heavy glass mask And made first contact with her lips. A pursed eclipse of dark-blooded skin bordered in bronze And the scratch of fingers hard as metal on his Adam’s apple. From that day we took our breaths from blackness. Sundog Howl first published in The Mechanics' Institute Review ‘Better bring A shovel.’ – Scott Walker, Sundog When Scott Walker died he left me his voice, Tore out the redness of his throat and pressed it in black. Scott, you go night flying And I walk in the day. I put my ear to your coffin. Heard nothing. You promised you’d be listening, You and Brel; bet your getting along real well. They buried you like a dog’s bone Finished playing. Scott, you walk beneath the earth. There’s no dancing near your grave. The later stuff, you couldn’t dance to. Thought I’d bring a shovel, and a show. Later, I heard you punching the meat Over by the funeral spread. The thumbs of spring Have closed your eyes. The disc turns and turns again. The sundog sets The sundog plays Another set piece. The Train Goes Backwards first published in Finished Creatures ‘the apparition’ – Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro Peeled faces look down, don’t notice the tunnel; The dry white ghosts of plants scream against the stopped pane. The Young Mariner first published in New Contrast ‘Had I from old and young’ – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner The world is just an albatross With a human round its neck. At the funeral, she speaks with gritted teeth. We wore away the soft ruff and hard rachis, Our arms stretched wide, our legs straight, like a dangling crucifix, On a plastic string that neither of us could snap By tooth or beak. We broke the horrid silence of the sea. We ran aground and splashed black paint beneath blue braes. We broke and kept on breaking Until Inanimate-lived-in-Animate. The parched Polar Spirit wisps away. He licks his lips to speak; he thought the polar opposite. The casket closes. She loses his attention. “I’m the damned pallbearer.” He rubs a cracked nail over an aching shoulder. He rests the wooden chute on his slick black suit. Through the crematorium grate waits a nation of ash and smoke. They lumber on Like dead men tugging at the rigging. With a tired step He sets the sun close over tomorrow’s morning. Biography Daniel Hinds lives in Newcastle. He won the Poetry Society’s Timothy Corsellis Young Critics Prize 2018 and his prose poem review of Jay Bernard’s Surge was one of the winners of the Shortlist Book Review Competition 2020, held in celebration of the Dylan Thomas Prize by Swansea University. His poetry was commended in the National Centre for Writing’s UEA New Forms Award 2021. He was also one of the winners of The Broken Spine’s Flash Fiction Competition. He was shortlisted for the Streetcake Experimental Writing Prize 2019 and the Terry Kelly Poetry Prize 2018, and longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize 2021. Two of his poems were highly commended in the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts Water Poetry Competition, judged by W. N. Herbert and John Burnside. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The London Magazine, The New European, Wild Court, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, Southword, Prairie Fire, The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Blackbox Manifold, The Honest Ulsterman, Fly on the Wall Press Magazine, The Morning Star, Finished Creatures, Rewilding: An Ecopoetic Anthology, Newcastle University’s One Planet Anthology, Amethyst Review, Perverse, Streetcake Magazine, Riggwelter, Orbis, The Seventh Quarry, New Contrast, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, York Literary Review, Poetry and Covid, Bind, Acid Bath Publishing’s The Worst Best Years: A Student Life Anthology and Travels and Tribulations, The Wilfred Owen Association Journal, Selcouth Station, Nightingale & Sparrow, Black Bough Poetry, Abridged, The Poetry Bus, Spellbinder, Cardigan Press’s Byline Legacies anthology, and BFS Horizons. He has also had an essay published in Pre-Raphaelite Society Review. He was part of a panel of judges for the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts Belonging Poetry Competition and contributed to New Writing North's Dawn Chorus collective sound poem, which premiered at the Durham Book Festival. He graduated from Newcastle University with a first class degree in English Literature, and a Distinction in his English Literature 1500-1900 MA, for which he won two prestigious scholarships, the School Bursary Award and Excellence Scholarship. He was commissioned by New Creatives, a talent development scheme supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts and delivered by Tyneside Cinema, to produce an audio piece based on his poetic sequence The Stone Men of Newcastle. Twitter: @DanielGHinds
Fevers of the Mind 