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Best Poems Written by Fiona Caldwell

Below are the all-time best Fiona Caldwell poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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Science

It's past midnight; the witching hours
 softly creep through the darkness.
 Music muffles out of an open doorway,
 shadows thump as hearts beat.
Seeing fluid bodies merge in time
 I'm the wrong piece in an incomplete jigsaw,
 watching chargeless as giggling electrons
 attract and repel, weave an
 intricate dance amongst pulsing protons.
 Chemistry was never my best subject,
 much less the murky peripheries
 where chemistry meets biology,
 the hormonal collision of chemical bonding
 with fusion and reproduction.
 Walking home, constellations map the sky.
 The moon cycles its rhythmical shifts.
 There's safety in physics, cause and effect,
 bound in formulae, logic and reason.

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Becomings

There are times when the body
is as numinous as words – Robert Hass

Others, however, when it declares forcefully
its sheer bodiness;
your stomach tightens the waistband
of jeans you bought just last month
in the style of a ‘boyfriend’ you don’t have,
and no jumper’s baggy enough.

Physicality forces outwards, running.
Hills are the quickest route to redemption.
You recall Gethsemane as muscles flame,
fuelled by guilty glycogen from last night’s binge.
The world contracts corporeally.
Each stride increases the laxative effect
of emotions you don’t pretend to understand.

And yet there’s no catharsis
and escape from the self is absurd.
It’s the process of translation,
ritual purging through corporeal philosophy,
pounding the Will with rhythmic strides.
Forget those cloud-dwelling thinkers,
living in dualist minds of ascetic detachment.
Ask any runner: there is no destination.
It’s the shift, the constant becoming.
We’re all just atoms and stardust.

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Body: a Glose

“Consider the kind of body that enters blueness,
made out of dead-end myth and mischievous
whispers of an old, borderless 
existence where the body’s meaning is both more and less.”
- Eavan Boland, ‘How It Was Once In Our Country’

Liminal, caught in the suction
of waves falling back to the sea.
Hybrid, fluid between worlds which
split genderless identity;
consider the kind of body that enters blueness.

Luring lost sailors onto rocks,
rulers of river, rain and sea.
Prototype virgins, sexless souls,
paradoxical history.
Made out of dead-end myth and mischievous

narratives that flow with the tide;
shape-shifting siren, lost and found
with knife-slashed legs and open mouth
a bleeding hole whose only sound
whispers of an old, borderless

story echoed through centuries.
Transient tides hide paradox,
detached pain and volatile self
which rise and crash like waves on rocks.
Existence where the body’s meaning is both more and less.

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Anorexic: a Glose

"How she meshed my head
in the half-truths 
of her fevers

till I renounced 
milk and honey 
and the taste of lunch.”
- ‘Anorexic’, Eavan Boland

The pervasive pain of hunger 
fastens my mind to flesh and blood.
Mindful, aware of each moment, 
success in the heart’s slowing thud. 
How she meshed my head.

She’s there in the space between thoughts 
and then she speaks the thoughts herself. 
She’s me but not me, voicing fears 
and hidden threats, praising my health. 
In the half-truths?

I could sense myself, an echo 
mirrored in hatred and discord. 
She was my safety, my comfort, 
yet I feared the double-edged sword 
of her fevers.

She whispered paradoxes, rules 
that restrained my spiralling thoughts 
with dialectics of control, 
structured security of sorts 
till I renounced

the chaos of my former life, 
distilled through her inverted love. 
Angles of detachment, senses 
keen with hunger, nightmare dreams of 
milk and honey.

I didn’t set out to lose. Just 
knew that I didn’t want to gain. 
My fears numbed in her cold embrace, 
emotions faded, as did pain 
and the taste of lunch.

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Run

Sometimes you feel like
you want to run forever
away from yourself.

Others you want to
curve inwards like a black hole
away from people

or stay forever
in fluid space between thoughts
where you don’t exist.

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Abersickness

A not-quite-there longing for somewhere
not quite home. A transient town with a
shifting population: three-year stint students
refreshed each September like a busy webpage,
locals who’ve lived there for years like anywhere,
visitors who come and go and occasionally
never leave. It’s a bubble on the Welsh coast,
a semi-urban jigsaw of business and learning
in the vertigo of hills and sea. It’s a safety net
for the semi-lost or the liminals, a merperson
of a town. Abersick: a common term to describe
the vertiginous nostalgia that can occur once gone.
Nothing concrete; a faint yearning for something
that only really exists in your mind, nothing
you could put your finger on. Like thoughts.
There’s a strange energy to the town that
pulses in the tides. It’s the sort of feeling that
pulls in your chest like magnets or pheromones,
makes you want to run forever down a stormy seafront
or leap into the windy sky and fly. In Aberystwyth,
you can do anything. Abersickness: the state of
missing a town that feels like home. It’s physical,
sharpens like salt in your veins and spins your mind.
Once Aber’s in your blood, you’ll never leave.

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Mermaid

Sometimes you run
until your feet feel mermaid pain
and joints grind bone-on-bone
like calcium clockwork
and that's the moment
you don't know you've been waiting for
and you run five, ten miles
more than planned,
mind lost in the rushing sea; senses
sharpened by salted wind raw from dawn
footsteps balance the earth's shift.

You're semi-aware, endorphins
loosen your senses to drift
mindless clouds through a hazy sky,
sense of self solidified in motion.
Coded in muscle, you point
outside, inside your body; ego
dissolved in runner's high.

There's a reason she never
returned under the sea.

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Mirror

It’s not a Wonderland
until you conceptualise it.
A series of discrete events
you could arrange in any order
and they’d still make sense.
She’s a moment in fiction,
in the reality of your mind.
Sometimes it matters more
how things seem to you
than how they actually are.
She’s a subjective reality
which mirrors both ways.
It’s a story of gaps, bridged
like neurons across synapses.
The Wonderland of imagination.