Poetry

I work on our poem;
finally the tears come.

 
From Still Journal of Short Verse
© Sally Crawford, 1997

Sculpting from Nature

The earth, measuring her years in billions,
makes our own epoch rather small
on any but the largest timeline.

These plants knew an earlier earth:
cycads, eucalypts, conifers.
They're not familiar
so I come upon them
seeing all plants differently.

An artist worked here
planting and tending
tie travelling among them.

For such geometry as the world is made of. 
What is this structure that is a plant?
Rooted in the dark of earth
waiting for the force of light,
whatever light is, 
to reach down, even through the rock,
to draw it up to feed from water and our breath
in the presence of the all-enabling light.

From Hepworth's Garden Out 
(ed. Rupert Loydell), Shearsman Books, 2010.
© Sally Crawford


New Day, London

Some days, other cities

 materialise out of the stuff of London's morning.
Kraków, with its fine stone flutes and flowers;
fair Dubrovnik.

Odd, then, to wake
in a city at war with itself
a chosen conflict,
a civil war, of road rage.

Each day its participants rise
marshalled from their beds
alarm calls
echoing a still more ancient summons.

Instead of pulling on the boots of battle,
they lock themselves in body vehicles.

Foot down, race lights, driver after driver
leads the charge.

While all around them whirls
the largely unseen enemy

- the gas.

From Agenda
© Sally Crawford, 1998

Bank of England


Sometimes, on a weekend, you can see
the small door open that's quite high up
within the larger door, and the Governor's men
or the Chancellor's men extending their legs,
up and over, as they emerge,
blinking, into Threadneedle Street.

The inside looks much more like a palace
than what you're used to in a Bank.
A tour will take you down to see the gold.
In the vaults, pallet upon pallet,
and so much of it, still, they have to be careful
how they spread its weight
this being a building set on London Clay.

The man showing us round tells us that each 400 oz bar
has its own provenance; that they can trace it back
to the mine it came from; that one bar sank
with a ship once and centuries later they brought it up,
dented and covered in barnacles. They cleaned it
and weighed it and found that it weighed
exactly the same as when the ship went down.

Some atoms had moved their position
but not a single one had joined with any other element;
not a single one was lost.

And for a moment his City face is allowed to soften.
This is his passion he's showing us.

 From Stand
© Sally Crawford, 2000