The night I dreamed of peacocks
By Joe Fearn
Quite surreal really;
Buddhism classes in a pit village,
the monk outlining the philosophy of An-atman (there is no self),
me resisting the temptation to ask him
who it was sitting there telling us this,
then dissuading him from going to the pub in full robes!
Drink in hand;
I moaned on about electing a dictatorship every five years,
and how, when they spat down our ally,
people stretched out their hands to catch the gob.
He recommended ‘right-mindedness’.
“When walking a stony path, put leather on your feet, not on the world.”
“Right-mindedness; become like the peacock;
peacocks can digest poisonous plants deadly to other birds.”
Outside, ice darkened on stockpiled foreign coal.
That night I dreamt of peacocks,
in numbers so vast, they proved impossible to count.
*******************
A Yorkshireman in County Mayo.
It’s so familiar I could pass the exam:
leaves of abandoned autumn
scratch the road past dry stone walls
to this cow-dunged path.
The mountains give a true sense of place,
the sky has burnt the liver over Killernan.
Sitting on a farm gate
overlooked by dozing cows,
I miss nothing-
birds change direction,
a bloated moon pulls clouds around itself,
a bee bumbles
two wasps slip into a rotten apple,
and a black beetle lifts its rear
like a scorpion
near my left hand;
making me jump off the gate.
Back at David and Lynne’s house,
a cup of hot tea is most welcome.
Pulling off my boots
I tell Lynne where I’ve been,
she asks me
“Did you see the beetle?”
*******************
Lumb Bank Chimneys
In that valley,
in that place,
a soapy moon
washed night
from my eyes,
and it seemed:
Every country has a lake,
in every lake there is a city,
in every city there’s a river,
in every river, a canal.
And every canal has a lock,
every lock holds the face
of a drowning child,
who calls to its mother,
who stands on the bank,
seeing and hearing
nothing.
*******************
The Heart of the Matter.
In Deneby
two friends
see a man walk by
with a bed on his head.
In Thorne
a ten year old
watches a llama
eating his dad’s
privet hedge.
In Stainforth
Geordie Smith
carves his name
on a signal post.
In an Antique Land,
two vast and trunkless
legs of stone
stand in the desert.
And my mother will say
“The circus has come.”
And my friend will say
“Evictions are common.”
And our teacher will say
“This is a poem by Shelley.”
And at assembly the headmaster will say
“Geordie died on the railway.”
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