Two poems from Kathryn Simmonds’ third collection of poems, Scenes from Life on Earth, published by Salt in October 2022.
Sunflowers, September
Too often now
they’re shivery,
tattered, catching at us
with their ruined looks.
Which of us
could drag them
by the roots, even
this one with its head
half gone.
Don’t their centres
still sleep bees,
or one at least,
we’ve seen it curled
and dozing
in a deep brown sun.
Ungainly girls,
they’ve held us too
this shrunken summer,
graced our little
lives, reminders
of what yellow
means, looming gladly
every time we pass –
did they really
spring from nothing
but a chip of
button, ridge of toenail
clipping, joke
of seed?
We’ve learned
to wait. We’ll wait
until they reach
their last, each floret
dropped, each
leaf a failure.
Even as they bend
towards the earth
their heads are packed
with other lives. Next year,
they say. Next year.
On a Theme by Augustine
‘Animals, and even lifeless things, praise you through the lips of those who contemplate them.’
(The Confessions 5.2)
In my nonsense let me make a blessing of this stone, this chinked and broken flint, two inches in diameter, white vein flowing through its smooth school-jumper-coloured heart; this relic of your dream, discreet and trodden on, who if it could would surely thank you for its necessary work, its job of doing nothing much but sitting in this fallow flower bed five steps from the garage door. How perfectly anonymous its rind of garden dirt, no stony little fingers drumming at the ground, no hat to tip, no sound, no sound.
Does it praise you? No, it lies inert, cloistered as a Carmelite, and waits for spring, or rather doesn’t wait because it has no mind to know its seasons. Does it praise you? No
– and yet it does, but only if you let me say it does, and so I write this down and do.
‘On a Theme by Augustine’ was previously published in The Poetry Review
