DAMSEL CAUSING DISTRESS
The knight errant sent for me, but I’ve gone missing
For three days now, while he’s composed a ditty:
In the tide of feminism I still haven’t given up kissing
Being what is termed fatalistically pretty -
But I can be the ‘no’ that makes for nice
When his flame burns under his boiler suit,
Then I’m decently torpid like a fish on ice
Where the guts need to go when the runts root -
A pillowing breast, my nightcap a soliloquy
To hell with his billowing sails and pregnant ships
Let him go, this guy who’s got everything but me
With his big thighs, big legs, big hips -
All the things we women should shun
Save satin, silk, squirm, sperm, and …sun.
(c) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER (2008)
BETTER HALF
for Roger and Tessa
I feel his presence as if he stood before me
My thoughts are tea-leaves only he can read
A brain scan shows I want him to adore me
While my heart shows for him my wanton need.
I trawl through the day, he could never bore me
I think of him even when I bleed
Heart of my heart, friend to never score me
Necklace of desire, bead after bead -
He knows my ways, how to love and shore me;
His speech shows me where and how to lead;
He never hurts, his will would never core me,
Or leave me hungry where I want to feed:
At times we see ourselves, strange and rude -
Clasp each other, beautiful and nude.
(c) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER (2008)
GANGSTER’S MOLL
The gangster’s moll now exists
Beyond the proffered film season
Impeaching authorised fiction
With cries, and real tears. For
She and the boss presumably didn’t care
To penetrate the mysterious body
Of God in the Universe, preferring
Hot shots, to the ultimate betrayal.
Of people they grew up with, she doesn’t tease
The short-circuit of big questions, just shrugs
And accepts his disappearance, like cash
Running in and out of a wallet.
Doesn’t take it to heart or too hard,
But she’s praying to get the kids’ hands off the gun.
(c) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A DAME –
and there is no dame like a building society or a bank!
There may be nothing like me, but I assure you
the world would have gone to hell but for organised sex -
if boys and girls were left to nature’s provenance,
a person like me would be nowhere at all.
Oh, I know how to milk attraction
and stabilise what is essentially of short duration:
if boys and girls were left to innocence
there’d be no delighting old men.
If that sounds unfair, I didn’t make the rules -
all this spontaneity leaves everyone very poor,
the Church, the magistrates and the building societies
are all depending on the regulation of love.
It’s the people who won’t smile who bother me,
hard fitted, easy suited, do they think it’s all for free?
(C) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER (2008)
THE AMAZON MEETS THE GREEKS
When life was thick with possibility,
Before the written word and the weighing scales,
Your definitions held too much probity
In the rich seamless embroidery of our tales.
Our vanished mystery, which your history sealed
Up in the libraries of the planet’s scar.
So what way to better wield a shield?
You men just skirt the theory of war!
Words became deeds – there were forests to lop!
Hard iron entered body and soul
I cherished my child as a cosmic tear-drop
Bound to osmosis in the ocean’s roll,
And took the sword, and chopped my source and dower
Because you underestimated female power.
(c) Rosemarie Rowley
FOR SUSANNE
I came in search of skill and I found virtue
In your climb up the stairs you were neat and clear
Making no excuse for the way he hurt you
But you cling to reality with a straight and peer-
Less eye. On lined paper you have set your mark
What could you deviate from, if not from right
And knowing you is quite enough to park
Truth on the lines, the tine your birthright.
In this dark house Jews lived and hoped and dreamed
Of a land where their strangeness was a claim
To universal justice. How in the dark they teemed
Until hope ran like melted butter on the name
They must excise. Born in a country that did them wrong
You forbid yourself the luxury of song.
(c) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER
(2008)
DEMETER AT THE CHINESE OPERA
So, I invited you to the Chinese Opera impulsively
Thinking of masks and dragons and triumphant mystery
I though it was time we threw off our coats
Of mourning, you for your daughter
Stopping one night, on the way home from a party,
So randomly, cruelly, killed by the monster
Who has slain more than all the century’s wars
And my private sorrow for which there is no funeral.
I remember your straying husband also
Loved the Chinese Opera. What will happen
If we all meet between the acts?
Surely forgiveness will come like snow on the mountain
And we will live in a harmony that can never be suppressed
In a slow majestic music that takes account of grief.
(C) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER (2008)
THE TOKEN POETRY EDITOR
Sexless, unloved, this poem tycoon
Reads the heart’s treasures as the brain's boon,
And riven with erudition, explores the spaces
Where uninvited couplets kill the places
With talk of probity and probability.
This mortgaged toad of honesty gives glee
To those who find in truth a rash offence
And save their daily lies in deference
To a lone columnist like herself, persuading
All that is needed is this harvest of envious raiding
To feed the bonfire of youth and exploitation –
The seducer’s vocabulary of apt explanation
On why God is absent from the universe,
And can only be heard in exploding verse.
(C) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER (2008)
THE TEMPLE PROSTITUTE
The God came to me in the guise of a stranger
His gold body scent was of great sublimity
His arms were marble pillars, and his embrace
Melted the whole world on my belly.
He tuned me to the refinement of my own nature -
Pitched me so exquisitely I fell from heaven -
Totally vanquished, till I remembered
All there was of paradise, and the number seven.
He has the unfolding of centuries since
To worship me as a goddess divine,
But they couldn’t build churches fast enough
To deny our union in the votive shrine.
The salt of humble pilgrims for my wantonness
I, who had everything but blessedness.
(c) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER (2008)
THE MAD SECRETARY
Hunched over the computer, I am mystical,
With mental white gloves and a karate belt -
A daylight cursor, but on my bicycle,
A word and energy transformer, a flickering Celt.
Such metaphysics I can make into sensation,
Turned into binary formulae by the boss,
My passion is for punctuation-
But the lingua franca doesn’t give a toss.
I see the point. I accommodate the pause.
I rinse the cups and make the coffee sweet,
I am saving myself for this man of laws,
Of Brehon provenance, who will entreat
Me to be his love, his partner and co-genitor,
Of a life graph, where he can trust the monitor.
(c) Rosemarie Rowley
From IN MEMORY OF HER (2008)
ON HIS BIRTHDAY
from Anne Donne to her husband John – supposing she went on record..
Five senses have we, but just one soul
I take you part by part, and then the whole
Your fingertips begin at shadow’s end
And I on each a hundred kisses spend.
Your toes from which radiate your joy
Your soles, your feet, your legs I all enjoy
Your shoulders, arms, are ceaseless comfort trained
Your face, your hair, your lips are thus arraigned.
Sweet tower of enterprise, and honeyed substance found
We share our treasure where we most abound
Our secret selves are now a flame of sense
Where we explode at last in innocence.
Exploring ways to end all life’s regrets
Our joy a million, million tears forgets.
by Rosemarie Rowley
from IN MEMORY OF HER Dublin 2008
FOR MARY MAGDALENE
Between necessity and freedom I was crucified
Perceiving Himself endlessly on the cross
Yet aware, as an onlooker, petrified
My vision that never was, would be His loss.
I mimed too, as they hammered in the nails
Once more assuaging myself in His deep tears
Once more my heart rallying where my speech fails
To give His lips the vinegar it fears.
Sun eclipsed, I dallied with the vision of day,
A multi-chromed banner the old enemy was twisting,
Till I could no longer read in stone and clay,
My flower-head lopped, topped to the moment’s listing -
I shone for Him like a speck in the glory of the sunrise
Waiting for twilight, the beauty of the stars’ surprise.
by Rosemarie Rowley
from IN MEMORY OF HER, Dublin 2008
ALMOST AN APOLOGY
Sometimes he enchants me with his word
The sea of phrases laps around my feet
His vision hones on truth just as a bird
Seeks its mate to fit a fancy, greet
With the sun each rising lovely day
Preens his feathers shining in the wood
As a flowered clearing on the first of May
Seeks redemption for all Adam’s brood -
The twain, the pair, the loser man with Eve
Stumbling on knowledge – a foxglove’s draught
A sweet sip to stage a sin, as if to grieve
Hard labour, the smithy’s spear and shaft
To gauge surrender, ‘twixt good and evil torn -
To gouge the heart, this child of woman born
by Rosemarie Rowley
from IN MEMORY OF HER 2008
DEMI-MONDAINE
You belong in silhouette to the dream’s theft
And weft with paid desire, look all adoring
At the man who’s made your life bereft
Of actual household dreams, he says it’s boring
Fresh linen, dimity and damask blue
Would be my veil, too, for daring
To ask: did it happen to you too?
And: when did your sorrow go past caring?
Don’t try to leave this room without an answer
Or you’ll turn back – the swathe of silk
In my eyes - you see, at heart a dancer
Each night I come home with the doorstep milk -
In the big bad world to be a cinch in style,
In the good small world to be a bright tear trickling.
by Rosemarie Rowley
IN MEMORY OF HER 2008
THE MOON HANKERS
Though none can comfort me, nor sage, nor oak
Nor heart of bronze made in a silver hoop
With gem encrusted golden rod to poke
Out my eyes in mystery’s final scoop -
Flanged with crimson, dreaming the polite
And suave boulvardiers of a nation
To feel myself what precious little light
Man’s first step has had upon my station -
I’d seek you out, you sapphire of the seam
Until you’d say I’d swallow back the sea -
How like a comfortless queen I’d deem
Myself as such heaven bent to me,
Leaving me lonely in the western sky
Beckoning you hither for eternity.
By Rosemarie Rowley
published IN MEMORY OF HER 2008
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