The Plough Changes its Beads
by and published in Edition Four of Pomegranate
The plough changes its beads in the ink we sit under,
the sand-glass cold and the sea echoing
the pulse of the Mary Celeste. Greeted by green
huts named ‘Maurice’ and the hovering of a solitary,
russet kestrel, we collect sand into obsessive piles,
watching five stars realign, as if a tree had opened its bark
and spoke. The rearrangement of these interstellar notes
into their own fugue became our dust and our water,
our promise to give ourselves to ourselves. Ourselves
to each other.
The blind grit ruined the warm darling mixture
in a gust of wind. Running towards the sea’s indignance,
the plough still realigning, we found the shell
and laughed. (Cello double stop sevenths, major
thirds, primary colours.) Descending darkly the moods
change, a collision, a broken satellite passes, the
closest thing in the milky way. Your blind father cannot
get up from his chair. We are late home, the life
ahead makes us late. Sudden shoots of light-gas
govern the twinkle of an iris.
Mist begins, extending light’s harmonies. Your nose,
my nose, protein with sparks, embracing the birds
and the dunes and the trees now dissolved in night,
like a sweet drug inking its purple way through blood.
The change of the plough’s thought marked the wool scarf
wrapping its way around the red-white cliffs
and winked at our ringing through air, towards stretching
thought and time birthing its altar-bound children.
The five glistenings in the black stopped their entropy,
as we became the diamond blue fits, the gas photon brilliance.
James Macnamara
James Macnamara is 17 years old and studying towards entry into Cambridge University to read English. He intends to live in Shakespeare and Company in Paris for a year before University… or at the very least spend a year in France learning French. His poetic achievements involve entering the Peterloo competition and Christopher Tower Poetry Prizes unsuccessfully. He enjoys painting and playing ukulele when not playing with funny word combinations, and receives advice on his poetic efforts from poet and novelist Gareth Calway.