SHEERS, Owen


Swallows

The swallows are italic again,

cutting their sky-jive

between the telephone wires

flying in crossed lines.

Their annual regeneration

so flawless to human eyes

that there is no seam

between parent and child.

Just always the swallows

and their script of descenders,

dipping their ink to sign their signatures

across the page of the sky


Not Yet My Mother

Yesterday I found a photo

of you at seventeen,

holding a horse and smiling,

not yet my mother.

The tight riding hat hid your hair,

and your legs were still the long shins of a boy's.

You held the horse by the halter,

your hand a fist under its huge jaw.

The blown trees were still in the background

and the sky was grained by the old film stock,

but what caught me was your face,

which was mine.

And I thought, just for a second, that you were me.

But then I saw the woman's jacket,

nipped at the waist, the ballooned jodhpurs,

and of course the date, scratched in the corner.

All of which told me again,

that this was you at seventeen, holding a horse

and smiling, not yet my mother,

although I was clearly already your child.


Mametz Wood

For years afterwards the farmers found them -

the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades

as they tended the land back into itself.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade,

the relic of a finger, the blown

and broken bird's egg of a skull,

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white

across this field where they were told to walk, not run,

towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

And even now the earth stands sentinel

reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened

like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave,

a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm,

their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

in boots that outlasted them,

their socketed heads tilted back at an angle

and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

As if the notes they had sung

have only now, with this unearthing,

slipped from their absent tongues.


Coming home

My mother’s hug is awkward,

As if the space between her open arms

is reserved for a child, not this body of a man.

In the kitchen she kneads the dough,

flipping it and patting before laying in again.

The flour makes her over, dusting

The hairs on her cheek, smoothing out wrinkles.

Dad still goes and soaks himself in the rain.

Up to his elbows in hedge, he works

on a hole that reappears every Winter,

its edges laced with wet wool –

frozen breaths snagged on the blackthorn.

When he comes in again his hair is wild,

and his pockets are filled with filings of hay.

All seated, my grandfather pours the wine.

His unsteady hand makes the neck of the bottle

shiver on the lip of each glass;

it is a tune he plays faster each year.

Farther

I don’t know if the day after Boxing Day has a name

but it was then we climbed the Skirrid again,

choosing the long way round,

through the wood, simplified by snow,

along the dry stone wall, its puzzle solved by moss,

and out of the trees into that cleft of earth

split they say by a father’s grief

at the loss of his son to man.

We stopped there at an altar of rock and rested,

watching the dog shrink over the hill before continuing ourselves,

finding the slope steeper than expected.

A blade of wind from the east

and the broken stone giving under our feet

with the sound of a crowd sighing.

Half way up and I turned to look at you,

your bent head the colour of the rocks,

your breath reaching me, short and sharp and solitary,

and again I felt the tipping in the scales of us,

the intersection of our ages.

The dog returns having caught nothing but his own tongue

and you are with me again, so together we climbed to the top

and shared the shock of a country unrolled before us,

the hedged fields breaking on the edge of Wales.

Pulling a camera from my pocket I placed it on the trig point

and leant my cheek against the stone to find you in its frame,

before joining you and waiting for the shutter’s blink

that would tell me I had caught this:

the sky rubbed raw over the mountains,

us standing on the edge of the world, together against the view

and me reaching for some kind of purchase

or at least a shallow handhold in the thought

that with every step apart, I’m another step closer to you.

Landmark

Afterwards they were timeless
and they lay that way for a while before standing
and dressing, reclaiming their clothes

from the white-blossomed branches of the blackthorn tree .
And already they were part of things again:
his watch, her ear-rings, their clumsy shoes.

They noticed the telephone wires, the time,
even the broken rug of a long-dead sheep
folded at the bottom of the bank .

On going they stopped and turned to look back,
holding each other as if to let go would mean forever,
and they saw where they had been ---

a double shadow of green pressed grass, weight imprinted.
A sarcophagus, shallow among the long stems
and complete without them.

Liable to Floods

'Liable to floods' the farmer warned them.

And on the map, the letters arcing down the valley

in black and white

but still the major wouldn't listen

tipping back his cap with one finger

and laying a fatherly hand on the farmer's shoulder

'Don't you worry Jack,' he said,

We've got this one covered.'

And so they made their camp,

a thousand tents across the valley floor,

but even then as the GIs tapped the steel

they felt the backbone of the rock , shallow beneath the soil.

For the next two days they trained

under Moel Siabod's shoulder.

Greenhorns from Kansas, Ohio and Iowa,

sweeping in a line

through the ditches, streams and bracken,

preparing for the landings on Utah and Omaha

pegged as yet to an unknown date

hung somewhere just over the horizon.

On the third night they slept to the sound

of the rain's fusillade and the artillary of thunder,

while outside, under the cover of darkness

the river pulled herself up and spread her wings,

bleeding through the camp like ink from a broken cartridge.

The guards were woken by their tin cans and cups

set afloat and clinking against each other

like ghosts in celebration.

They raised the alarm but it was already too late

and the river, arming herself with their rifles,

flushing out the latrines, swallowing the jeeps,

gathered them all and ushered them off.

And as their camp beds became rafts,

gently lifted and spun, more than one GI

woke from dreams of home to sense,

just for a second, somewhere deep in the bone,

how suitable this was,

as if the weather had finally caught up with their lives -

this being taken at night without any say,

this being borne, this being swept away.