Lee Harwood
Safe-Past-Words?
1.
A voice says something
but inexplicable
The words float in and out
flash pictures
Nights of dreams that, on
waking, shred your heart
And then...
The vines are cut, pruned with skill
To the south dunes ripple and shift
around marram grass and splayed fences
A man leans on a table beside
a large pot plant (a pelargonium)
ninety years ago The soft colours
Am I Leonid Andreyev? Are you Ivan Belousov?
Am I Ivan Belousov? Are you a pelargonium?
It’s as daft and remote as that, sometimes
Your heart neat in a matchbox
placed on that cloth covered table
‘Look closer Look closer’
The log wall the potted palm
the crude comic figures on the cloth
and - at the centre - the matchbox
decorated with a line of
three red stars, or are they hearts?
And
on the horizon gold flecks
of distant glories
2.
Man talk Woman talk
the blindness and vanity
and all the contradictions
And a hundred years before Andreyev
‘Princess Caraboo’ appeared in Bristol
talking ‘convincing gibberish’
and fleeing to the Americas
But your heart
in the words beyond the words
beyond the masks and good intentions
A long journey
that fades with potato starch
courtesy of the Lumière brothers
A long journey
that passes through shadows and
out
Page(s) 86-87
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