By Moira Garland
Twenty Twenty
All that year it got greyer, the blue
sulked like dirty washing.
Elastic snapped by the thousands
narrowing our eyes to reluctant smiles.
Children gambolled about like old myths
of black and white photographs.
We scratched at surfaces
women spoiling for a fight
alongside the dead voices
missing those bright brassy aisles
of luminous packets, like goblins
trying to eat their way into skin.
Liminals Take Over
We grow like sudden ghosts
positive images when the oak tree turns overnight
to white as though the shock
is too much watching over
clean rail tracks and multiplying toys
left by spirit children
on the gabions holding back the beck.
Holograms walk on newly formed desire paths
blank voices emanate from inside their mechanism
puppets programmed to greet each other
let out from cages
miming the longstanding friends
without differentiation.
Because the sun shines like a black star electrons
bounce around from one to another
with no reason that the physicist can work out
she is empty
weighed down with problems
and we don’t care
so many of us in places once substantial.
We are watched and even admired
until we are a novel reality accepted by all
who have their own prophesies
peer at the appearance
of brazen buddleia and rose-bay willowherb
storm-purple ornaments of the absurd.
Moira Garland lives on the outskirts of a Yorkshire city. She has been widely published, most recently in The Brown Envelope Book (Culture Matters).
Liminals Take Over was originally written on April 8 2020 when I felt more disposed to take comfort in the surreal and the absurd, whereas now in July 2021 I struggle more to evade news of the pandemic stretching into the future. Nevertheless reading and writing poetry has been important in sustaining myself in the various restrictions. And I have been reading many more novels to immerse myself in alternate worlds and escape anxiety about contracting
Covid and, as someone long ago diagnosed with ME, especially long Covid.
Twitter: @moiragauthor And occasionally: www.wordswords_moirag.blogspot.com