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Two poems from Scenes From Life On Earth

Kathryn Simmonds

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

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