Lesley Saunders

Fable

'Bronze figurine with gold earrings and a spiral torque, Vani (Colchis), 3rd century BCE'

Going down on their knees to kiss the warm throat
of the earth after the damage years of thalassa thalassa,
their first words to their waiting wives turning all that fury and hurt
to furs and gold, the old campaigners know nothing of satiety,

their orgasmic homecomings just another leg of the journey:
battalions of bad boys in a landscape of bare rock and riddles
are what they do best, one-night stands with easy foreign girls,
day-trips to hell. The ram's fleece was part of it

along with the dragons'-teeth and WMD, tall tales,
cheap drink. What was heart-rending
was the lost continent of earrings in the form of birds,
the way she pushed her words towards him across the floor,

how she pulls off her petals, the way she cries like a lamb
in wolf's clothes. How it will all end in war.

A Story of Blue

There's a colour at the back of things
                              sombre and shining: ceremonial sky, seas

of ripening wheat, a dolphin reconnoitred
                              through spume. The darkening surface of time

as it passes. The northerly sea-lanes,
                              sea-glass carved into currencies,

opportunity like a sail on the horizon.
                              The irises in a blond stranger's gaze,

his shoals of soft stinking cloth,
                    a new kind of blue that's been wrung

out of green, vegetal not heavenly.
                    A dyer's fingernails indelibly stained

the ultramarine of the veins on her hands.
                    The flung-out ikats. The distances.

Watch

In their hearts they are the island nation,
race of islanders, even the inland tribes
who have only the dream of sea are obsessed

with horizons and the voluptuous possibility
of ships. Unassailable as cliffs they have gone
to the end of the earth to the edge of the land

to see for themselves how war looks like a sail.
On the outskirts of towns there are artichoke beds
and the serene mooring on a slow-moving Frome

and after lights out the late night shipping news.
Still their eyes have the scrimped sheen of sea-glass
and in the simple dawn they bandage their hearts

like world-forsakers against the bottomless crossing
through fog to the outcrop, atoll, holm.

Tide

They arrive by night, coming in like shoals
                    or spies on the grey tide. By first light
they have vanished into the hinterlands

where tables in lamplit homesteads are set
                    in readiness for the unwinding of cloths,
the raising of life from the dead, the reciting

of chapter and verse behind closed doors.
                    In the begynnynge was that worde,
its full light falling now on all surfaces

and sills, the glistening milk-pail, the porringers
                    kept for best. Someone sits with both hands
cupped at her ears, each syllable sipped

like old barleywine. The good books
                    will be read and read till their spines break;
single leaves will be had by heart or sewn

into seams,for they shalbe called the chyldren
                    of God. Across the water, a condemned man
requests a candle, walks into a sea of flames.

Remains

Under the tennis courts a mirabelle orchard,
                    under the orchard cables and rubble,

remnants of human settlement labelled or guessed at,
                    a cow-skull laid facing west, later floodwater

soiling the day-room. DNA under the fingernails.
                    What I recall is the storm, the downpour

through whose cathedral I hurtled in bare feet,
                    the rain through my frock like a hot second skin.

Soon they would leave, carrying the scrolls and god-things
                    out of the burning, the fire and smoke of autumn,

the leaf-soot, leaf-brittle, forgotten laundry,
                    the ash and grist of seeds, shoes in the car park.

I, we, three, the oldest words in English.
                    Remembering changes how things were.