|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
Fire-blown mounds of ash do swirl
About a charred pathetic doll
With one surviving dead man’s eye
Whose eyelid flickers back no more
Torn up like a tethered fox
Mail-shirt bloody, helmet gone
Sinking in the ooze of death
Upon the hungry battle-mire
A crash of sliding masonry
As a church wall mourns
The king’s hall burns forlorn
Like the world tree
Laying low at land anchor
A survivor peers across the muddy field
Naked trees like sticks
He retreats into a ditch
As, drifting from the smoke,
The ghosts of a viking host march forth
Wolf-creations, struggle-weary
Bloodied axes hanging
The spy lies back
Earworn by gnarled yarling
Considers the greed of man
Where no church or school
Might ever stand again
And, with muddy water in his ears,
He tries to remember better years
Rowing across a goose-fed mere
With a curvesome lady companion
How they found a golden bed
Hidden in the lofty reeds
Where, with finches twittering, they made love
With full warm tenderness
And the breeze rippled across the water
The thud of heavy boots
A song not overmood
Wakes the warrior from his dream
As, with black-toothed grin and priest's gold chain,
A bearded carl raises his sword
And, with a curdling roar,
Thrusts it into the lover’s heart.
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
Along the paw-trod path
Narrow and dainty through the gorse
Where yellow flowers
Lie dim like fallen stars in the mist
Comes a silent visitor, hesitant
It licks its lips
A taste like vinegar
Humans of old and long ago
Their lonely essence gone
The heather-stepper flinches
Shy even of memorial eyes
The castle ruined on the hill
The old manse below with broken windows
No smoke at the chimney
Only the wind that whips around the gables
And the twitter of nesting swifts
Nudging open the gate, it sniffs
The garden is overgrown
Cow parsley four feet tall
The front door at the porch swings on its hinges
Frightened at first, it shies back
But, then, seeing the door ajar once more
It pads in
In the hall, the photographs are curled in their frames
The flock wallpaper brown with age
Light rectangles appear on the wall
Where paintings have fallen to the floor
As nails have loosened away
Through a dirty glass-paned door into the kitchen
A female body, face-up, mummified by cold
Her icy fingers gnawed by time
Clasps a mobile phone to her breast
The last note she wrote
With her thumbs
Before the screen went blank
Was: "It won't be long now."
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
Do you feel the great turning, the maelstrom coming around, spitting sparks of searing birds that circle each other screaming in a language like pain? Blisters burning feathers, beaks and eyes till they ignite like flares spiralling in the tempest of this world. High performance vehicles lose their wings in ever-turning pressure, four by fours and pickups, thousand cc superbikes all spinning round and round. Their windows, bumpers, lights and panels flail off into airy channels, ricochet off stop lights scutter down the highway till they form an evil spout. Sucking up the houses, gardens, fences, trees and chickens, dogs and cats and mice and rats and farmyard animals. Spinning them so hard they break up turning and exploding like cartons spraying all across the town. Gaining pace the maelstrom grows, widens, sucks up earth and loess, strips the soil and grinds it up and spits it out. Spreads over the terrain, living feeding off the pain, sucking the last seeds from the fields. Finds the streams and all the rivers, cuts them out like veal and liver, eats them up like a cannibal. The sound is like a roar of terror, amalgam of all vicious weather, battering, beating, bruising every soul. And yet we won’t stop the oil fields, pipelines, stripping whole horizons just for dirty shale.
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
The desolate perfection of solitude. The shiver of recognition that there is only one being on the mountain, and that’s you. The pine trees watch, the boulders brood, but there is no one there. The splendour of being alone, crushed to fragments by the chirping of crickets, pierced by the song of a mountain thrush. The sea of solitude, a sea of sounds. With no noise at night, sounds rush you like a wave, a pounding surf inside your head. But, then, in the ozone tonic morning, the sky fills you with blue happiness, emotions so high you are born again on the mountain, and loneliness seems the greatest joy a man could wish for. Praise be to God I’m alone. Though the mountain air throws its voice from time to time. “There’s a whole world out there waiting for you — what are you waiting for? The world doesn’t care whether you're here or not.” I know, I think. I am free, so free I could dissolve into thin air right now and fly through that hill, through the planet for that matter. Find myself on Mars and know what loneliness is all about. Earthly loneliness is for cowards. On earth there’s an outside chance a human will turn up. On Mars, loneliness meets a new friend — desperation. The desperate need to remain whole, to not break up and boil in the Martian atmosphere. To not depressurise and explode. Lots of long walks required on Mars I’d say. Circumnavigation would do it. Is there loneliness greater than that? I think there is, but I’m afraid to tell you. But there is a tremendous rhythm to be found in silence. It might take days to get it. You might suffer with sound death in an echo chamber for a while. Tinnitus might strafe your skull case for what seem like endless nights. But one day you’ll find yourself listening to a distant, low base rhythm that starts from the balls of your feet, the back of your skull — you don’t know which — but it’s so strong, so virile and strident you see the whole forest take up arms and shake its fists. And you shake your fists too, and dance like a bear in a dry riverbed — wolfsbane shooting off your claws like bullet tracers, spraying colours all over the pine tree valley. The music in silence. It’s dripping from the trees, drifting in mountain mist.
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
All words and wonder, wobbling copper green
Foam and guano floating
In the sea cave’s lee
A flock of gannets raucous on a rocky pile
And the ever-growing echo as the men came by
Climbed from the boat
And dragged it from the water
Bare feet on painful pebbles relieved by sand
And, at the back of the cave, they dug on their knees
Scooping with their hands
A tiny purple phial was found, ancient and Phoenician
The granite stopper plucked
And, instead of a salty seaweed smell,
An oozing, resinous scent
From the darkness of consciousness
A rose and orange essence
Though not exactly a smell
Rather a panorama of far-off painted and planted secret messages
Kiss-kept by a woman
The tinkle of her bangles upon her wrists and ankles still
Echoed in the cave as if the lady was there
Her glancing eye gripped one cold
The press of her heel as she posed before dance
The burst of laughter with friends
Admiring her pencilled eyebrows and plum-blushed lips
Hips and elbows endearingly tipped
She leant forward and whispered into the traveller’s ear,
All words and wonder:
“Find me some ambergris and bring it to Arabia
Find me some ambergris to perfume my breasts
Find me some ambergris and bring it to my tent.”
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
Shadow souls flying across the sea
Of my senses they knew, what a mockery,
How do I write the song says the dream?
Whereupon the wanderer falls
In the scribbled pines
Of a forest burnt
In the addled minds
of ruminants
Under the spell
Of prescription drugs
A waterfall falling long
Whispering into nothing
And how does a shadow sing along?
With the words planted
When their minds are gone
The cultured lie pearl
Calumny and drought
Don’t ask me
I don’t know what it means
I just write it down
Medicated monsters flee themselves
In fiery wagons chasing hope
When no earthly vehicle
Can help them now
And the darkness of the drones
The forest-flatteners blocking the sun
With gun-carriage storms
Of all fissile material
Spitting their fish scales
Into our faces
And who wrote the song?
Down by the deadpond
Now that Weyland’s work is done
Tantalite, tungsten, sin, tin and gold
Seem pretty small in your hand there’s a phone
But all over Africa mines are still smouldering
How do I write the song says the dream?
Lord help me I feel the world psyche waking
Whereupon the wanderer falls.
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
Some way from the Firth of Forth
A shoal of glittering mackerel
Swirls and sways
Swells with the sea from silver to black
Flashes white and back to silver and grey
A humpback whale
Juddering its leathery jaws together
With a throatful of panicked fish
For a moment it bobs in place
Then sinks down slowly again
To await its next prey
But some fish get away
Dash, dash, dash
Gannets with wingtips a-black
In fizzing copper-green dive bomb
Pinning their wings back
Weaving, spiral bubbles rising
They spear the blank-eyed fish
And paddle away
In the tidal pools by the beach
Where the tiny sea herds crawl
Hermit crabs pick at morsels
Washed up by the tide
Snipping with their pincers
To nibble mackerel tails
They ward off competitors with their giant claws
Crabby-crawl tiny sea herds
Squabble in the pools of the micro-sea
But steal when you can the more beautiful shell
Of a crab that is greater than thee.
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
To be the ones to see that storm
Rage across the jungle
And witness the light arcing in flames
From sky to horizon
To feel the imminent thunder rumble
To the pads of your toes.
How close will it come?
At first it was a thin black smoke
Spilling across the sky towards us
But now it was coming on, and on.
It can take half a day to arrive
Or it can roll like a spirit in half an hour
The power of forked lightning
Sparks from peak to peak
Burns the ozone and sets your feet tingling
And the hairs on the nape of your neck.
The sudden deluge of rain
Is so strong on the sand
We picked up our packs from the side of the lake
And ran to the hut.
Contemptible humans! I’m not done with you yet!
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
At harvest time
Where a white ghost flies
Across a blood red moon
Behind the fields the rolling hills
Are purple, pink and blue
Over a dreaming wheat field
A barn owl patrols
Noiselessly it glides
Over the golden yellow drifts
Suddenly, it flaps its wings
And stares down intently
Below on the soil a startled vole
Sees a white star fall
A squeak and the owl is gone
And with it the limp vole.
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
Details |
Diane Leggett Poem
Car gliding gently, whirling down
Mountain engine idling fine
Tall pines flying in circles
Going on for a circumnavigatingly long time
Around the world, no houses
Around the trees, no world
Buzzcut for a boy
Frizz for a girl
Reaching the highway
Open your mouth
To the north and south sierra mountains
Grey and jagged brown
Up and down a heartbeat trace
Across the curve of the world
Right at the gas station, water bottles rattle
The road a narrow vein on the dusty ochre desert skin
Lean with your elbow out till you’re halfway down the globe
Till the car door’s on fire and you can’t take any more
Time to not think about anything
To feel the humming engine’s spirit lift
Chassis growing wings out wide and tyres thrusting wanting air
And, suddenly you’re up there, legs as light as oxygen
Heart pounding, face beaming, spirit going up up
Body begging to come down down
Mouth not knowing whether to be open or shut
Back gently to earth
Turn off to Joshua Tree's dusty ribbon highway
Desert swelling of the mind
Dead reckoning of the blind holy hills
The way they sway rocks in the red in the heat
And the gravel with the chirp and play
Of the desert insect sea
And the sun falls so quick
Once white now dark the world glows deep
With colours rose and mint
Put up the tent
My girlfriend and me
Hear the first coyotes yowl
I get a flashlight and go to the trunk
See a hairy limb in the side of the beam
Flip round see a tarantula crawl towards my feet
Torch turns to check around and see a hundred other
Feeling fingers, fur and fangs
Twitching, marching, swarming from the rocks
Go back to the tent
And zip that mother up, check the flap
What’s up? says my girlfriend. Everything ok?
Oh, yeah, I say, just making sure no mosquitos get in
I’ll get my toothbrush, she says
No, don’t go out, darling, I say.
Let's do that in the morning.
Copyright © Diane Leggett | Year Posted 2023
|
|