Four Poems

Prospero's stones

I have thumb-printed your last volume.

Here are incantations. Satisfactions struck
in half-line lengths, driven phrases that lap
around each other. I shiver as they bind.
Here are the peacock's screams at evening:
harsh as the santoor, refined as a high
high string, dashing the face of 'we shall,
tee-tum, live happy ever after' with a splash
of anguish. Here stones are scored with
a prophet's bloody one-eyed censure.
Release me from their charge? You will not.
Yet see them, often as not, fracked into
lyric slices or, hollowed to catch rainfall,
cupping reflections of untainted beauty.
Then there are some - I would say hallowed
...