Poems by 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.

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').'

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.

Tourist area

Today a man is drowning.
Outside, the oyster-catchers squeal across the bay
and the seal sings mother's music to her milky pup.
Inside, the woman is machine-rinsing the towels
with scent of mango and jojoba
before laying out the gels in the shower cabinet
and warming the plates for the Indian takeaway.

Across the tidal race their son is setting up in business
in a sandy cove safe for internet porn
downloadable in Uxbridge, Moscow and Tucson Arizona,
not knowing that the ungainly lump of pensioner
in the caravette across the cove was used
by her father in the same manner as a child.
The man who is drowning's daughter
designs computer programs down in Berkshire
for missiles that will cruise over Basra and Kabul.

The man is drowning
for the day his grandmother
sang in the old tongue
while pummelling the fleeces
and all the while
while drowning
he wonders if
he would have
been drowning then.

So he doesn't yet know if he will walk out over the white sand
towards a rock near which a man will soon be drowning.

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.

Sophia's Old Weeping

Once upon an untime
(if this is the story)
among gods and goddesses
(lots of them, chatting) sat
Sophia, Wisdom (laughing),
and Lucifer (Light), very
thrusting (maybe laser).
And Lucifer brightened
(while Sophia cringed) and said:
"How boring,
darlings, is being gods and
goddesses, spiritual.
We are powerful"
("You are," said Sophia)
"so let's, oh yes let's,
make it physical."
Sophia's goddess spirit sank.
(You could see it sink.)
"No. No!
It would all
(they'll say, when you make them
physical) end in tears!"
She felt the tears
(if I remember the story),
dripping down her cheeks,
hot, wet, even then.
(There being no time, then.)
But Lucifer, being straight
forward, said, "You may be
right, Sophia. But I shall
(being Light, and powerful)
do it anyway."

So
(you don't need the story)
Lucifer, or Some God, did.
Make it physical.

And, as the Moon-Being saw,
what is made physical
is imbued with beauty,
and (as we all beings see) also
immersed in tears. I forget
(as, made physical, I would)
the end of the story, but when
I watch the oak tree shake
a thousand acorns, I say
thankyou, and wonder why
it comes on so generous, and when
an earthquake crumble centuries
of vision in a moment, and
the way human (for we are human)
beings, some of us, delight
in cruelty to those weaker than
themselves, I shake (I do, yes,
and you do too, for we are
human) with Sophia's
old weeping.

Let Us Pray The Furniture Game

Let us pray for an altar that is a humming bird.
Let us pray for a temple where ladybirds
fall foolishly asleep in the autumn
and are woken in spring by hedgehogs.
Let us pray for an apse like a quarter-football,
choirstalls that sound cockcrow sixty-seven times each evening,
and a chancel where kids run with jelly and ice-cream on their faces.
Let us pray for vestments of ochre in a noon sky threatening snow.
Let us pray a psalm that trembles like a child at the school gateway.
Let us pray a creed that mutters, 'None of your tapioca,
life's a bowl of ripe peaches.'
For a priest who chuckles down the mountain
bearing tablets of chocolate, and great with child.
For a processional hymn of stately farm geese
quacking along the muddy lane for no reason.
For an incantation that starts in the belly as a rumble
and ends up a shooting star in a throbbing night sky.
For a honey of a liturgy so thick and sweet
that the palate roars with pleasure.
Let us pray an intercession strong as the desert lizard's will
to survive another millennium.
Let us pray the petition of a hungry jackal
whose food has just scuttled away into sanctuary.
Let us pray for a sermon of ice on Sunday, spice on Wednesday,
and all hell let loose on a Saturday night.
For a circumcision that cuts the sky with the call of a curlew.
For a Hare Krishna orange circle in the town square
offering benison in the form of street maps that tell the truth.
For a prophet whose defecations come out in perfect globules
and who needs no wiping.
For a burial chamber where bats sing in a pitch so high
that only the granite can hear.
Let us pray in a dance
that whirling dervishes might call mere orgasm.
Let us pray in a yogic trance to lift an old woman's yearning
and transform it into a gentle death.
Let us pray for a ceasing of prayer that goes on, and on, and on, and....

The Furniture Game is played on writing courses to extend the use of metaphor. This one emerged from a Writing and Spirituality course.

Dancing the Sunrise in Snowdonia

Now it's time for her to meet the sun
through water. Her toes finger the early shale
but her other skin is naked by air that's
only just forgotten the laser spike of stars.
Stone sizes measure the geology of water
up her surprised nerves, while the crisp oaks
of first autumn gossip on the slopes
and over on Grandmother Mountain
no-one has yet thought of starting the train.

Her severed waist says 'Now for plunging'
and she falls into the water, a stretched swan at last.
Circling, still mind-tethered to land, then
floating, hears the sun say, 'I'll be along, along'.
Ears tingle with such rapt reception
that she takes the swan's journey down the lake,
a longing in her unshaped even by the sun's words.
She doesn't know how else her limbs might move.
Turns again on the spit of surface and lies
as if this poured, prism-scattering element
is her sofa-bed.

'Along', says the sun, 'along.
I'm biding time for us to meet'. Still she
wonders how, but swans along, time's child,
licking slices of breakfast birch bark as
they're sawn and rejoined in rippled silk.

Toes touch slate slabs. Sun seems not ready,
and her limbs say, half under and half over,
'Waiting, the only what to do is dance'.

Half over, half under, half in half out
of time, she dances to rise up Sun.
A few vanished stars regroup and, in line,
skip towards her across the sheen.
Sun's still hiding. 'Hurry', she tells him, and
'Stay there forever'. This coming together,
they tell each other, will be starburst.

Stalwart stones are dancing underfoot.
Particles of leaping air startle the trees.
A moment now of still dancing. He and she are
hovering, teasing, measuring out the breathless
lull before eternity pours flame -

Now - burst.
Fire falls on water, she falls
on him, and rainbows sing among wet stars.