Lionel Abrahams Poems

A dead tree full of live birds.
Why should I set this down?
On a young man's palm, a spiky clump
that could be a dried dog-turd
...

Lion (two or three), zebra (scores) and other thirsty
at a water hole. How alive they are! How lovely
while healthy - even while hungry, even when frightened.
We were up there at Kruger to (you could say) ‘gape'
...

for Lorenzo van Breda (b. 1999)

Child - you who have arrived in time and just in time
to knock for us at the tremendous door
...

(ON A FORM)

i
Emptiness
to the power of space-time
spirals in continuum round
...

Body, a-tumble in torrent of time,
attempts every minute to report
its last-found secret to the soul.
...

At honoured Yeats's age
(sixtyish, but no romantic senator
abstracted by the beauty of some child)
thrust by duty into alien classrooms,
...

(for Osip Mandelshtam)

Translators, critics, wife, admirers, friends
of Osip and impersonal protectors of his work
(they who defied their huge
...

Who beside my mother knew
a cabbage stalk stripped of its leafage
contains more goodness than mere garbage?
Her quick sure knife would pare away
...