Poems by Alison Leonard

Creation of characters

The woman talks to me. It takes time:
the place comes first, the wave, the slope,
the way grass meets boulders, the words
for hawthorn and shell. She talks to me
uncertainly, because she is certain of nothing.
The man, now, he is certain of everything,
but that will change. He has friends
here, they are a source of his uncertainty,
though he does not know that yet, and nor
do I. It will take more time for them to talk
to each other, and I do not know what
they will say. I have to wait. But I have
waited before, and I know how. The exits
and the entrances are cued by trust
in what there is and in what I am given to find.
Finding is like a mountain walk without a map
in weather you have no forecast for. They
have no foreknowledge either. But they
know who they are, and I, their creator,
or so it seems I will be called, do not.

                    © Alison Leonard.

To the men who plan war

You think there's nothing in the desert?
Nothing there but rats?

Listen to me.
There's a girl with huge hurt eyes there in the desert.
There's a stink with no water pipes to carry it away.
There's fear in the pit of the belly
and only a billowing fire of oil to see by
there in the desert.

But listen to me now.
This is what could be there in the desert.
Trees with finger leaves could burst into lush brown fruit there.
A sky flecked with clouds of pale pink could stop your breath there
just after dawn. That child now running across the grass
could whirl, and throw the ball, and be a proper child there,
not touched by you. A woman could lie soft with her child there,
men play strange games with counters,
smoke rise from fires as food is cooked there.
Yes, a foot could kick a ball there, just like
your grandson kicks his football at home.

Never say there is nothing there.
Listen to me.
Think.

Callanish Stone Circle

To come here asks nothing
but the shedding of protective turf
and the knowing that for stones to stand
there's one necessity: as much beneath
as is above. And no shoes.

You can greet them,
and in return they will greet you.
Think sinew, breath, retina, bone.
Bring yours, and they will speak with theirs.

Now here's the hardest shedding:
the word 'only'. Only stones.
Naked, without the 'only' judgement,
you can lock eyes with each of them,
and each moment will be a millennium,
and the marrow of your bones will shimmer
as if an orchestra on the most distant star
were playing an ancestral symphony
right by your ear.

For this is where your mother
built her altar, and fashioned it
in awe to face the wind and sun and sea,
not to bow down, but to stand,
shoeless, with her own song,
at the intersection
of the above with the beneath.
She asks of you nothing
but to stand, and let
the bones of your ears pick up the song.

Sisters of the Early Shift

We'd have fought each other, Rhiannon
and I, long ago, had we been brothers.
Her being Welsh, speaking the mamiaith
(at home, though not as a child at school for fear
of beating), me from Yorkshire, drawn across
the Pennines by economics and adventure -
Chester neighbours now, in edgy frontier
country - the Romans, Saxons, or those French
would have set us each at the other's throat.

Chester tried to subdue them, the derwen-
worshipping Druids, the even more ancient
hewers of tombs like Bryn Celli Ddu.
No Croeso i Gymru then, no A55
or Marches Radio - Glyndŵr's sons and
Llewellyn's daughters were rebels all against
William the Norman's tribe, Hadrian's heirs.
Offa built his Dyke against the Celts,
then came King Edward holding up his son,
his infant, on the ramparts with some joke
about the language; centuries on, His Royal
Highness tries a bardic phrase or two
and Meibion Glyndŵr threaten bombs
for his invested pains.

                      But we are sisters,
me and Rhiannon. Tucked in our semis,
with kitchen windows facing at the side,
in the middling suburbs of this border town
we keep a parallel early morning shift.
She lights the gas, I switch the rapid kettle
on. She's dressed and dignified, I'm in my
tatty towelling robe. I'm slippered, and guess
she is too. My man's asleep upstairs;
hers sleeps in Ynys Môn whence he came,
the stooping farmhouse between gorse and sea.
He brought from there his spade, his laying hens,
and a disregard for seatbelts and yellow lines.
The picture of him in my memory
is on the moped, helmet straps undone,
half-pint carton of milk between his teeth
and waving at me with both hands and eyes.

Rhiannon's nain was small as a nut, upright
as a dresser, her thoughts running like water
till she died. My grandmama wore stays
with fierce bone pokers that pierced the heart.
Her hen-nain fed the Penrhyn slate quarry-
men starving under their lord and master's
power. My great-grandmama trod the streets
of Hull, heard tubercular coughing behind
closed doors, and invented a lining, liquid
gold, for their throats and her pockets.
'Lung Tonic', she called it. It sold in gallons.
The dockers of Hull slept better, but died the same.

Not all Rhiannon's brothers would have fought
me long ago. Her hen-nain's hen-daid might have
followed Telford's cambered Watling Street,
hard-core underfoot, pick-axe in hand,
towards Llangollen, that great aqueduct
across the Dee, the Dyfrdwy, fast-flowing
boundary-mark - now crossed, first by canal,
then tarmac for our joint industrial age.
In Chester, sandstone ramparts slide to history,
watch-towers peer towards the setting sun
no longer alert to raiders, though maybe to
a burned-out holiday home.

                      One of the taids,
Gwynfor, struck a lasting blow for the issue
of borderlands and border tongue. He struck -
went on strike, on hunger strike, to bring
the mamiaith into the flicker of modern day.
What? Starve, almost as the master
starved the Penrhyn slate-men, for the sake
of Pobl y Cwm on S4C? Doesn't it
lower the currency? Not for Rhiannon
it doesn't.

                      And I, her sister of the early shift
but English, learn when we pass across the fence
eggs for the cake and scraps for the old hens
that nowt in my Yorkshire dialect compares
with her Celtic mother tongue, her mamiaith.
I honour my sister of the early mornings,
her ancestors, her history, and most of all
her tongue. Cornish is lost, Scots Gaelic hangs
by a breath, Brittany struggles, Ireland too.
Rhiannon taught me through her nain and hen-
nain not to set about each other's throats
but to honour all our sisters' tongues.

Welsh:
mamiaith - the mother tongue
Croeso i Gymru - Welcome to Wales
Meibion Glyndŵr - radical Welsh Nationalist group ('Sons of Glyndŵr')
Ynys Môn - Isle of Anglesey
nain/taid - grandmother/grandfather
hen-nain/hen-daid - great grandmother/father (hen = old)
Pobl y Cwm - 'People of the Valley' (Welsh TV soap opera)
derwen - oak (from which is derived the word 'Druid').'

Raven on Swirl Howe

The rocks raise her against the skyline
and they're singing about how they
were raised up. She's got pinions

fast to the rock, tight as her beak
is sharp to the ice sky, cold as the sun
is warm in the loose blue. Indigo black

she shines, still as the sheen that blows
up feathers and back, as the grass blade lifts
on pillars of ice, as the ice age forms and melts.

It's a moment, a footfall, I am
in step here, when the raven sees me
and waits, and waits, and only when
I'm slow down the shoulder croaks over the void.

Her flight from me is constant,
when egg-cracked, when male-mated,
when nested she is in flight from me,

so this footfall is a gift from the ice-raised air,
held between rock and transient crystal,
blowing soon away over the swirled snow

but catching me here, consuming me,
a fire on the skin, a breathtaking ice
like the tarn, destruction and birth
in crystalline contract, alert to the melt.

Eve (1)

Watch it.
I'm back at the gate of Eden
but this time with a queue of us,
broad, tear-stained, laughing out loud
and seeing each other for the first time.
We've found our way by the stones you laid
to trip us up.

I thump my heels in dance
along the queue.
Delilah calls out, 'Lilith's back!'
and we circle, sand-treading
each other's toeprints,
whooping moonsongs
in lilyish rhythm. And yet

if our blood seeps in and out
and through one another
like a delta on the verge
of the sea so, as moon longs
for sun, we long
for the unnamed Adam,
the memory of lust and
the haunting of wisdom.

Adam's other wife

I bleed, sir. Yes, sir, I bleed, and if you wince
at my mockery, then call me Queen, and laugh.
I will lie with you but I will not lie beneath you
for I am the moon around you, coming and going,
sweet sliced melon and sour round cheese,
pulling, vanishing, emerging, bellying,
light for your weariness and dark for your ambition
and neither, no neither lies over and above. Neither
no neither has power to name, for each creature
born of earth, sky and sea has an intimate being
defined from within, not named from without.
I am Lilith, I bleed with the moon and in bleeding
I offer you sharing of soul. If I pour and you pour
then mingling is sacred, your risings and fallings
your token and promise, my coming and goings
my answer and pledge: I will be with you
but I will not be of you. I am Lilith. I bleed.