Dom Bury

Hiraeth


The town tonight is like a little scuttled ship — the river
closed with ice and each road, each roof frost closeted.

Still, in spite of this, in spite of snow, the roses push up blade
by blade to shake out their small white fires, and will not close.

And I must confess this stirs in me now another road, another
ice-clutched path which, despite the winter, would not close.

Further down it I have walked, past the harbour locked into the hills
to where the sea turns in its sleep, its one white eye half-closed.

And though I name this home I feel it as a roof stripped off —
a scab, an old wound which, despite the years, will still not close.

Still I cannot say which map or scroll of sky I’d used then
to guide me back, or which alternate life I’d then had to close.

And though it moves in me still — the sea, I know I can’t return
to that same world the tide, that time has now dragged closed.
 

*

What My Body Showed Me


This window    wiped suddenly clear
in winter shows

the old wood up on the hill
I stood in last autumn

just to cut an hour out of time
to absorb one season giving

birth to another     the huge trees
stripping their own bones clean

until I felt I was     no longer alone
that something else

was moving   then stopping
then locking its breath against sound    I listened

so intently then I felt
my own body leaving me       I followed it on

unwillingly on
until in a clearing up ahead I could see

something   waiting
silent as the snow

as if it had been there all along —
a human that had been taught

nothing of love.
It beckoned to me then    I was

so afraid
but still I edged closer

until I could see this person’s lidless eyes
their utter lack of skin

and hear the noise their mouth made
as if someone had shown them a film

of the whole world burning on repeat
as if they had then    somehow lived

they spoke
each morning feels     like stepping backwards

into boiling rain
they said this and at once

I knew    how before me stood
the body I will have to wear

if all that can still be saved    is lost
 

*

Why I Have Chosen Not to Have Children


No part of me wants to remember the first time I felt it —
dipping hands into the hen-house to find each bird

a cinder, each egg still scolding hot, not yet hatched.
Later, climbing fields to find cattle birthing

the huge black coals of their calves, alive
at least until the ash piles cool and the last cow splits.

Even our midwives with oven mitts cannot claim
our infants’ new fevers, softly they sing

knowing something else burns through them
but the lymph in their limbs. I feel it too

but say nothing now I hear drought knocking
through the forest, each birch, each branch,

each blade of wood a time sprung match. This
is how we come to love only what will not kindle —

the flax-mud and the estuary still feeding the sea,
the burnt soil I press into my lover’s mouth, pleading.

Now, only the eyeless stand and signal for weather —
I have heard thunder shake out the whole sky and bear none.

And to think we thought the boatman’s song no warning.
How we sold him all our rain then cut him dumb.

*

All I Can Offer You Is This


How one evening each autumn,
a little after dark, the swallows return home.
How you can hear then in the roof their wings
clicking closed, their hive mind shutting down
each map that followed without intention
another map to these eaves, this house, I
come alive here, then I heal. But this autumn
the swallows have not come home.
The kitchen is silent but for the click
of the clock and the whir of the drum
and the hum of the stove and the drone
of the telephone and the world is now lighter
yet somehow, somehow also more heavy.


*

The Body’s New Weather


In waves it came. But waves so small at first
nobody noticed
the leaves dropping all summer
or the landscape’s frayed
yellow edges or the days we went
without wind. Then winter
packed up and didn’t come back. Then, again —
the glaciers burnt dry and the bears
suddenly without their soft
houses of snow. Then somebody
shot them and we thanked God for our climate’s
new harvest and we felt in
our own bodies this new food rotting —
strange heat in the lungs, cancer
ripening where the right meat
should have been and we named them
our own illnesses, maladies of the body
not of the earth the body
builds itself from. But then the earth
turned on us, each new season collapsing
until there was only high summer
and we felt then how the land must —
aching and empty and still we reached
into ourselves pulling up nothing. Or rather
not nothing but another new desert,
another woodland cut free of song.
Only then did our bodies turn themselves on
to protest like sirens in a city
that has already been bombed.
 

    9     What My Body Showed Me

    Kyrie
    13     Hiraeth
    14     Brother
    16     The Opened Field
    18     Black Bird, Nine Nails, One Child
    19     Fois Gras
    22     Spring Without Voices
    23     The Chapel in the Sea
    25     Under Dartington Redwoods
    27     Our Species

    Dies irae
    31     Snow Country
    33     Why I Have Chosen Not to Have Children
    34     Seasons — A Requiem
    37     All I Can Offer You is This
    38     On the Theme — Fire
    40     Hunger

    Libera me
    43     The Body’s New Weather
    44     Love as a Project for Small Children with Eyelids
    49     I Lie Down On the Ground to Make Peace with the Fire
             Jumping the Valley Towards Me
    52     Completion
    53     Extinction

    In Paradisum
    57     Afterwards
    58     Seeing the Whole World Begin Kindling
    61     Letter from My Daughters
    62     Metamorphosis
    72     Passageway
    73     Threshold

    77     Morning