Emily Bilman, Resilience

The Epidemic

Plague germs steal in with the sunset

through the shores into the arteries of the city,

through the round, hairy, curved, bony backs,

by the spry tails of the panic-stricken rats.

Sisyphus, the plague’s harbinger,

stifles his scapegoats' gasps

under heaps of stone where

he hides the havoc of his loot.

In the playhouse, one body of rumour,

the rows behind me babble, babble, babble

like crickets creaking above a cloud of crops,

gossiping in trifles, interrupting each other,

Imprisoning the actor within their power-antennae.

Like the maddened mob ripping,

then throwing the ugly features of their faces

upon their scapegoat to mock, then slay him,

the audience sunders the actor from his stage.

A lost automaton,

Sisyphus rolls to the hill's top

the ceaseless rock of his ill-spent guilt.

Sisyphus' gyrating ghost, Black-Death-1347,

rooted out 25 million souls, snuffing the vigil lights,

off vicars, off hamlets, off manors

within the scar of three winters.

In the city, the plagued choir-child yells out his accursed,

yet cleansed guts to the white deafness of a bed-ridden ward.

Despite Sisyphus' ghost hovering over the urban plague,

the healer, my bondsman, gleans the boy's final scream

like a tiller burrowing, ploughing, planting his soil's plot.

Further details

Eugene Datta, Water & Wave

Anjar, 2001

The pyres go on burning like constellations from across lightyears.

The years, more than twenty of them now, haven’t doused

those flames. 

In the makeshift tent, under layers of borrowed relief blankets,

sleep played a reckless hide-and-seek with demented gusts

of wind.

What did the young man say when we asked him about the body

they were carting away? The midday sun scorched what was left

of the place.

How can you cremate this person without knowing if they

were Hindu? we’d asked. The shape of a human foot

in the flattened flesh.   

We don’t know, he said. No one is alive to tell who was who.

We cremate the bodies we retrieve, the Muslims bury the ones

they find.

An odd balm to the fractured air gasping to the noise of hammers

and drills, and excavators removing debris. We stood on a roof

a meter or so high.  

A cry had oozed faintly from beneath slabs of concrete until

almost an hour ago. Only mangled toys in its place now; festoons

of dusty, warped things.

Attar-scented fingers of a stoic stranger, pir-like, touched

the handkerchiefs covering our faces. His family lay buried some-

where, or was cremated.    

In a hotel room with cracked walls our last night stayed

in the custody of a contraband bottle. We left

with a life’s worth of nightmares. 

Further details

Today I take my true shape.

Growing, thirsting, swallowing everything.

A guzzling, swirling lemonade of debris,

I’m breaking the bank, breaking all the banks.

I’m coming up taller than the cows.

I make new real estate to please the up-and-coming

gulls. I hightail it into several cellars, pubs and living

rooms, redirect the traffic and atomise a million people’s

travel plans. Everyone will need to make a special effort

to cross me and do it gingerly, in a funny tiptoeing way

but no matter how carefully they tread

I’ll still fill their boots to the brim

with wet, and they’ll just have to suck

it up, continue on their way squelching.

I’ve always preferred to live as if someone else would

have to come sort out the mess.

Further details

Louise Warren, Poison

Destroying Angel

I come to thee veiled ,

I come to thee gleaming

of gill and membrane.

How I be made so?

all alone in this dim church

of oak cloister.

I be a shared self,

born out of root coppice

and soil forest tracing,

of underworld dark.

I felt, felted, fruited,

followed rainwater seam

until up I pushed,

shaped and stiffened

my milky birth,

pearled into this light.

Now I float above my stalk

like a vision.

Kneel.

Take me inside you

and we shall be married,

then I shall become your bride.

Later, deep within, I trail my broken gown

towards your heart.

Further details

A. R. Williams, A Weathered Ship

A Familiar Weight

after Franz Wright

I carry anxiety around in my pocket, a small,

familiar weight.

I fidget with it when silence grows too loud. I’ve learned
if I leave it out too long, let it linger
in the open air,
it balloons.

What fit in my palm
soon presses against my chest,
tightens in my throat, until I am
no longer holding it, but held by it and

my anxious ponderings are pondering me.

Further details