'Forget me not, ' I thought you said,
and your gaze was straight and true.
I wondered, by your garden's edge,
could I disremember you?
...
1. Morrigan
There's a way of ripping Roman flesh
that only ravens can do. You take
...
Last winter, incendiaries ignited
A bloom of flame in your bedroom,
And the gramophone gouged
Through ‘Lili Marlene’ one last time
...
There is a stile still standing in the ghost
of a hedge, and a broken gate beside it, opening
on the pathless nowhere of a ploughed field.
...
Sometimes the flayed things have spirits.
When my husband is drunk in bed, I go down
to the cellar to find them, their stripped
...
Leaning over a stone bridge, knowing
Daubenton’s bats slept
beneath me, wrapped in leather,
pollard willows, white clouds
...
Is the moment of sunsplashed brilliance,
the walking-in by chance at the time
of greatest need. The blessing is swallows
alive from Africa, cavorting in English sky.
...
1.
Perfect Pearl – prince pleaser –
Clear and clasped in precious gold:
...
Stamped with characters of beauty, their veins
Like waters at a confluence of streams, arrowheads
Point heavenwards. The traceries of their leaves
Are essays in divine proportion: three lobes
...
Beating the bounds of the parish, I saw
The old gods on the outskirts, skulking in the woods.
It was all moonbreak and sunglow. Woodwales jittered.
...
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
...
“Sapper John Lane, from Staffordshire,
father of four, reporting for duty, Sir.
Married man. Occupation: miner.
I’m here to kill the Minotaur.”
...
Inside the resealed jar, Hope
turned quiescent in darkness,
folded her butterfly-wings
above her back, hid her
...
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.
...
Weed-flesh, wind-wracked, unbleeding
Clumped and kicked along the strand.
The stench and slickness of it;
Holdfasts clench like claws.
...
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
...
The vale is wakening, but up here
the fringe of the downs skulks
under clouds. Butterflies sleep,
their vacant eyes jewelled with dew;
...
Giles Watson was born in Southampton, but emigrated to Australia with his parents at the age of one, and lived there for the next twenty-five years. In addition to poetry and painting, he writes essays on natural history and mediaeval visual culture, is an avid walker, photographer and amateur naturalist, and has a keen interest in theatre. His academic work has included a doctoral thesis on religion and culture in England during the Second World War. As a secondary school teacher, he has taught English, History, Drama, Sociology and Film. Much of his work is infused with his own idiosyncratic spirituality: awed by nature, steeped in history, and inspired by a quiet sense of the sacramental. He currently lives in rural Oxfordshire, where the landscape, archaeology, flora and fauna provide continual inspiration for his work. He has a daughter living in Australia. Giles's long-standing fascination with mediaeval poetry has led to a series of paraphrasing and translation projects, including modern English versions of Pearl, The Three Dead Kings, The Anturs of Arther and the works of Dafydd ap Gwilym. He also writes poetry of his own, most of which is inspired by his local environs, and by British folklore. He has a long-standing song-writing partnership with a composer, Kathryn Wheeler. An interest in early scientific expeditions to Australia has been a further inspiration.)
Forget-Me-Not
'Forget me not, ' I thought you said,
and your gaze was straight and true.
I wondered, by your garden's edge,
could I disremember you?
The light refracted at your heart:
a warmth that radiated through.
'No, I dare not let them fade:
those powdered hues of pink and blue.'
'Forget me not, ' I hoped you said
as the summer bleached to white:
it was the hope that startled me,
like a swallow, into flight.
'Forget me not': I know it's true,
little flower of grace and light.
The time must come, whate'er I do
when I remember in the night.
'Forget me not, ' I know you said,
and I was aching with the need
to cry that I could not forget -
so deeply planted was the seed
that it would germinate in drought
or in soil too choked by weeds
for any other plant. 'Forget
me not, ' you said - and I agreed.