Poems by Laura Potts

Friday

 

The evening of your days

I remember

always

on the other side of a hospice night.

A funeral in my face,

your ghostcandled fatherlight

still laughing, bright,

white

in the winter of your age.

 

The world in your ember days

lit up its lights in a biblical rain.

Long and far,

the crack of the night

in that dark throbbing room

showed your four-medal war arms,

your eyeballs stars.

The nightjars were still and did not stir you

when Death in his formal garden

took the bones of my grandfather,

took the hissing skin

that brimmed with disease

in all the mists of that morning,

the dawn

at the edge of his sleep

something last,

lost,

gone.

Your terminal cry I heard long.

 

After that, the morning hours ran on.

In a dawn darkly,

on a singing white page

at the rim of my memory,

the long wartime age

of your history

I scrawled:

your lost laugh,

your long love,

all the days of your life –

 

and never your death at all.

 

Yesterday Calling

 

Somewhen,

a gull snaps its wings

and laughs

as I stretch out the past

 

to the city with its dark heart

and us,

splitting our skins for a kiss.

 

On the rim of a memory,

spinning,

we fizz

like silver pins

on that street

or this.

 

My lover’s words I remember

trembled

like globed pearls on tepid stars

the hot dark of torchlight

kicking

from the pavement

sparks

as he went.

 

Bone-bent,

with eighty-six years in my face,

I read books

and play cards

and years have dried up,

slow prunes

in a vase.

 

But last,

in my crabbed hands his skin,

doused with river lights,

no foul breath of wartime but

a whole lost world of long-kissed nights,

 

thin films of eyes candled bright

in the lobes of my palms,

the four-medal arms deliberate,

passionate,

strong.

 

After: the distant salute of a bomb.

 

The past slid back

 

and our childhood stands

in a long-worn place:

 

the plush of our hands    

by a stammering fire,

the sputtering tongue

of a candle then higher

than dark, brotherly hills.

 

Still, I see the films of our eyes

now flicking with years:

warming our bones

on the doorstep of home;

the ropeswing,

the late light,

the searchlight

which groaned

in that long afternoon

when you didn’t come home.

 

Alone,

the cracks in this ground

still hold twelve-year old feet.

The voice of the child that you were

curling the ceiling to meet

with the ghost of your long-lost

past.

 

And last,

I think of the distant

chime of your voice

that split

at my skull;

 

my dull dumb thumb

on the telephone which rung

out the world

for your words,

screaming:

 

wherever you were

you were gone.

 

Morning on the water

 

and a wet-mouthed world

gave a lost last look

at the lovers who curled

on the banking,

spinning,

awake

poured a hot greasy laugh

at the stars in the lake.

 

I remember you

my laughing love

when that night

we had chips

and grins

and no scent of filth

on our teeth

on our lips. Down fingertips

the long hot

silver which spilled

from your skin

I remember

 

when the feminine ring

of a shop bell, the fossilised swing

by the garden shed

rings out an evening.

 

But here and now,

the garden giggles and springs

at the chime of your name.

 

Your voice, unremembered,

I’d know miles away.

 

This is our night,

 

so we dampen down

stars onto pavements

which sleep on the other side

of the city’s eyes.

The long slow slope of the hills

stretches away

into the dark

and home.

 

In a park, the mouth

of a streetlamp gutters

and laughs. We are grinning

through a candle hour,

kicking back history

in the arch of our backs, the distant

chant of childhood a train wrecked

far off its tracks, a shadow lost

 

in some long-corridored past.

Cross the dark hills and

you hear them calling –

the other us –

the children down the hallway,

scrawling a sentence

which one day will speak

in the thawing smudge

of a kiss in this street,

 

where here and now

we are fizzing

and laughing

and dancing

when it is our night.

 

The History of Home

 

Twenty years from where we are,

the sob of stale marriage will spill

from the chin of a hill.

 

I know this. Notice our diction of armchairs

and doorframes. We weep and parch fruit.

In dead afternoons, my cracked porous face thick

with twenty long years of you.

 

Oh

but lover

this light on your lip was remembered,

the bells of your words,

the svelte bulbous pearl

of the globe in your throat.

 

I’ll write a letter – a bullet – a note.

 

And think of you on some nights,

the pocket of your neck,

the fist of the wind which we knew

made erotic

the shuddering stars,

the dark world a lamplight

a torchlight

ours.

 

This house howls with the hiss, with the swell of itself.

I think of your mouth on my skin, your kiss.

 

Laura Potts is twenty-two years old and lives in West Yorkshire, England. Twice-named a Foyle Young Poet of the Year and Lieder Poet at The University of Leeds, her work has appeared in Ezra Pound’s Agenda, Prole and Poetry Salzburg Review. Having worked at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace in Swansea, Laura was last year listed in The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also became one of The Poetry Business’ New Poets and a BBC New Voice for 2017. Laura’s first BBC radio drama Sweet The Mourning Dew aired at Christmas, and she received a commendation from The Poetry Society in 2018.