Three summer poems by siofra thomas

Prodrome

a nonpareil pillow princess, i spent three

years in bed and forgot how to talk. but pain

like a field of blooming lilacs stirred me

to ask the names of small objects: this,

that, the other one… i indicated them only

weakly from where i lay. no-one gave me

the words i asked for and only a cool

compress was applied to my head. the

objects became sultry and opalescent,

wavering at the rim of a narrow lens.

the other one, particularly, but this, this

was also cunning… encumbered by their

mystery, i sunk into the stuff of pillows,

away from the world of men, and towards

the dreaded night

Heavy Viral Load

when i was twenty-six you held my wrist

and made slow and deep inroads into every part

of my being. everywhere i went you came

with me, flourishing rot-beast, making me

a terminal branch on my family tree, same as

you are on yours. my little peach blossom.

now i’m thirty-three and you are gone.

and still, and still everywhere i go you come

with me. and when i take you by the hand

—only it’s not you, it’s you becoming you,

and you become me too, you another dead

branch on my family tree. my little blossom.

and when i’m forty-one and far from

you, everywhere you go i’ll come.

you’ll take my wrist and spread me

into me: another dead end, another

soft unfurling bud.

The View from the Boat

ushered from eden at midnight – they should’ve been looking at fireworks

sprinkled bright on small devices, in eora or birrarung-ga – but time

was against them. they sailed dark into the new year, unguessable

and empty. only when they looked behind they saw it, striking

as a wife turned to salt: a great wall of fire, stretched taut against

the coastline, embracing every house, every tree, every being

left alive on the earth.

normally ablutive, the fire, like a love song, offered a series of images

unfolding in the weeks that followed. a koala, webbed and knotted

in burns, lies screaming on tarmac. a wombat is boiled in his den,

his home a road into phlegethon. the kookaburra falls from heaven

and stills his joke forever. valleys of festively-draped stringy-barks

turn to salt-white pillars, holding a scorched landscape like some

squadron of a skeleton army.

there would be great discussion about who had authored this disaster,

whether we had been too focussed on the sweetness of our songs,

whether the disaster was ours to right at all. but none of this was clear

from the view from the boat, where all that could be seen was what

now belonged to the world of the dead, and all that could be felt was

horror at having misunderstood the wolf note in our bargain. so the

people on the boat raised a hand

in quiet choreography, lifting their thumbs as one, and

took a photo of nothing as it bore down on them.

Siofra Thomas is a poet and translator working in Amsterdam.