FAIRY TALE by Graham Burchell

I can scare children
as the Victorians aimed to do

even on an August beach
tell a fairy tale

one woven more cruel
than castles turned to sand and

washed into oblivion
by the evening tide

I can think a tale
in sea forests

black haemorrhoid weed
where pebbles become life form

or unfortunates petrified
by the moon eyes of fish

portents of doom
cruel just as shell is

made from the powdered
bones of man

I may tell of anti-tides
that snatch at fool child toes

those that venture further
than where they are meant to go

kids yanked open-mouthed
into water babies

minds maddened forever
in that perennial wilderness

I see your children Kingsley
Hans Christian Brothers Grimm

in silly striped
or frilly costume

about to test
their altered wills

with ghost ankles in the small surf
and imaginations bleeding

MOTIF by Graham Burchell

Three notes I allowed
aloud to sum the August
beachiness of

herring gull
railway pigeon
otherwise birdless

fishless conjoin -
rust cliff and water world
beneath reflected sky;

that order/disorder/chaos
of iron colony salinity
in all its erosive pungency.

Which instrument to choose
bowed blown plucked
or shell-smash hammered?

One two or three?
which pitch above or below
the shoreline of middle C¿

What time-line to let it linger/
sound?
How hushed or loud?


(One)
Deep deep dotted quaver
Bflat bassooned like a train
a cliff reverb

a call beneath the bay in mezzo forte
average I believe
for the time of year.

(Two)
Higher - filled with summer hope
a dotted crotchet F
to fur the shallows

prick the beach dog ears
ring calcite crusted pipe
and sandstone blunts submerged.


(Three)
Then higher still to haunt:
An A flat dotted minim lashed
to dotted crotchet reaching

reaching under cloud-stretch
to fill kid’s shadowed sand holes
and sad hearts wanting.

BOIREANN by Graham Burchell

They are both old
Boireann and her

she wants to remain in the car

hunched

regarding the other
through the smear of a window

the intrusion of a wing mirror mars
a romance of meddled limestone

a partial view
yet she is content

because she sees

even when these days
rooks overhead look crimson

one colour among several is lost

and edges soften


I am younger
not as young as clouds blowing off the Atlantic
older than wild rose or bloody cranesbill
growing in the clints and grikes
of Boireann otherwise Boirinn
this Burren great rock frac-
tured
like her calcium-leached spine

osteoporosis of the karst

YARNER by Graham Burchell

A place of dryad and hamadryad,
there are eyes here by the million.

Many divert to watch me. Threatened,
they pause, cut short their song, stop
feeding, mating, working the cycle
of dispersion, growth and decay.

Their fortress is birch and oak
that rodded out of bilberry
and bent for the light
whilst alders drank
from the stew pond and Woodcock Stream.

Brimstone butterflies maybe messengers
but the lords of here are ants.
They carpet the fallen, severed
and all flesh that dares to linger.

For a heady moment
I am returned to Northern Peru,
to a brown Amazonian tributary,
home of bites, parasites, piranha
and rain-swallowed screams.

In Yarner, forest on a hill, life teems too
under a canopy of apparent calm;
late spring afternoon’s dream.

The unseen butchery is secret:
Insider whispers; death no louder,
no less lovely than abruptly silenced hearts.