Caroline Lazar

...

From Thursday afternoon Maths lessons
I remember geometry.

My body has become
...

Cassandra sees the shadows round
the house of Atreus

She sees
...

They are tainted sounds
Lockerbie, Dunblaine, Tianen Min
How long to soothe the wound?
Coventry, Stalingrad, Hiroshima
...

Last night I dreamed a princess
pricked her finger on a spindle,
slept for a hundred years,
woke with a lover's kiss.
...

The last High Queen of Ireland hears the voice of God,
just as her forefathers did.
He talks to her every day.
He tells her what
...

Today I wear
my coat of many colours.
I need a mother's love
to enfold me, to keep me warm
...

Always remember you are a child of stars.
Science lesson 1:
Every element
that makes you and your world
...

...

by degrees you are rubbing me out

a put down here
an interruption there
...

I have a voice
But it is harsh and cracked
From shouting.
...

I am numb.
My feet are walking a different path
To the one I intended.
I look at them, but they are no longer mine.
...

Chemotherapy - they poison you
but they poison the cancer worse,
so they say.
...

When I write poetry
I am distilling moonshine
on the sly.
...

We cannot know the heart of another
But we can speak in metaphor
We think of amazons and
the wolf chewing off its paw to escape the trap
...

They are the kindest of women,
beauticians, beautiful outside and in,
who give up free afternoons for the cancer victims
and send the patient patients home
...

It is not brave to follow him
Into the muck and bullets
He was a stickler for punctuation
And knew the Beggars Opera off by heart
...