Giles Watson Poems

Her first labour: making a globe
For the price of a silk-wrapped fly.

Her second, to trundle with it
...

Out of the slurry of vascular tissue:
xylem and phloem, leaf veins, stomates
and the fleshy organs of flowers, she
took form. Her irises were a coalescence
...

How many miles of mist-shrouded ramparts
Have I walked, soaked to the knees in dew,
With the solitary crow ever sentinel
Ahead of me on a bare branch, the vale below
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“Sapper John Lane, from Staffordshire,
father of four, reporting for duty, Sir.
Married man. Occupation: miner.
I’m here to kill the Minotaur.”
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Inside the resealed jar, Hope
turned quiescent in darkness,
folded her butterfly-wings
above her back, hid her
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I’ll bear with death as a going to ground
A bunkering-down, an embracing of loam,
My skull in the yew’s root. Weeds on my mound
Are heralds bringing a prodigal home.
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Weed-flesh, wind-wracked, unbleeding
Clumped and kicked along the strand.
The stench and slickness of it;
Holdfasts clench like claws.
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Black and haloed, my spiller of gold,
Stark and hallowed as a gilded ghost,
Raptured rhymer of the honeyed throat,
Pert proclaimer of embodied thought,
...

I could only speak in the sweet ironies of repetition,
So when he said, “Do not touch me, ” I replied:
“Touch me, touch me, touch me, touch me, ” and
After a while again, “touch me”, till he turned
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The vale is wakening, but up here
the fringe of the downs skulks
under clouds. Butterflies sleep,
their vacant eyes jewelled with dew;
...