Tracey Herd Poems

"Give me your tongue, " you cry
as I lower myself onto you
gripping your shoulders
as if you might fly out
from under me into the night

and I would tear it out
from the root and hand it to you
still warm, saying "love, love"
even though I were mute
and I would give you two sons
fresh from the womb

and here are my eyes:
the blasted heath is gone
and the daughter is kneeling
in gratitude, her honesty
a gift, not a curse, fully understood
to lead this man from his prison, into
clear daylight, into the sun,
scholar, little boy, king.
...

This is the mansion that God willed me
And no other. The ceiling is glass
And the sky is unreadable
And what pass for stars stare blankly
At something just over my shoulder and I
Am standing in the grand hall of mirrors
Like a chess-piece on the tiled floor;
A blind and insignificant player in a game
That the other has already won but I
Am trapped on my square while you
Are making love to another who is
Shivering but not with the cold
And I am laid bare against the world.
...

When he's away she doesn't like it much,
Pushing the reheated food around the plate,
The big, brass key rigid in the lock
Which she'll go back three times
To check before turning off the radio
And taking the water-glass to bed.

Christie, Sayers, Marsh are sitting
Well-mannered on the shelf
Pushed in tight to keep
Their suave murderers inside,
Their victims choked cries unheard.

She turns over onto her other side
Pushing the pillows forward, back,
Thinking of the spinster pulling weeds
And tidying the tubs in her well-tended
Garden in St. Mary Mead, between murders
As it were, but soon will come
The poison pen, the bullet in the dark
That could have been blindly fired
When the house's lights went out
But was only ever meant for one.
...

Here's a tattered old poster on a crumbling wall
Advertising diversions of spectacular dullness; imagine
The tedium of wet afternoons, a bored teenager,
Not James Dean, hanging around the outskirts
Of a dead-end town, not even able to picture
Other afternoons. The grass is a shabby sort of green
And the skeletons of rusting machines
Have poisoned the ground. The once gaudy
Horses that circle the carousel have broken down,
Their names half-heartedly peeled: Trigger and Champion,
Silver and Blaze, hardly poetry is it? They huddle
Miserably in a cold rain, waiting out the decades
For the children who will never come; sometimes,
A car door slams, and pinch-faced boys
With remote eyes scrabble over the fence,
Blowing smoke and oblivious to the weather.
...

God alone knows what's stuck in their throat
Although even He is looking elsewhere:
It's as if one of their dishevelled number had swallowed
A car on its attendant gravel and coughed it back up
As the tyres slip and the ancient engine protests.

They nose aimlessly amongst the thin grass
And scatter of rocks on a hillside that ought to be
Too steep: somehow, they remain rooted there
Like elderly ladies, pleasantly befuddled.
From this distance they are misshapen dots
That float, detached, from the tired eye.
They look up at nothing and bend their heads
Back down against the driving rain.
...