The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in,
Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth.
October’s the month for storage.
Thie shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach:
Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.
I am at home here among the dead heads.
Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won’t notice.
My heart is a stopped geranium.
If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.
Dogsbody noses the petals. They bloom upside down.
They rattle like hydrangea bushes.
Mouldering heads console me,
Nailed to the rafters yesterday:
Inmates who don’t hibernate.
Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze,
A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted,
Their veins white as porkfat.
O the beauty of usage!
The orange pumpkins have no eyes.
These halls are full of women who think they are birds.
This is a dull school.
I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet,
Without dreams of any sort.
Mother, you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness
Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.
I said: I must remember this, being small.
There were such enormous flowers,
Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.
The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry.
Now they light me up like an electric bulb.
For weeks I can remember nothing at all.
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.
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Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
