.
They sit on the bridge
.
they sit on the bridge.
cluster as close
as the round bulbs of road-
swollen blackberries,
dusty with travel. drinking beer
and port wine and they smoke and eat
sandwiches over the water
which moves slow as they do,
a rolling black gruel into estuary.
sometimes a woman passes, and they
will say something – I know it is
threatening, but there’s no malice
there (though you would have to live
nearby to know that) any more
than there is when you reach
into brambles and hurt yourself,
picking a berry. the night
sets around them – it lays
like a dog at a table. they take it
as company, put out their hands.
occasionally, under the bridge,
there’s a swan kicking forward
in peaceful grey stateliness
or the floating crushed wreck
of a beercan.
.
DS Maolalai’s poetry has been released in three collections, “Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden” (Encircle Press, 2016), “Sad Havoc Among the Birds” (Turas Press, 2019) and Noble Rot (Turas Press, 2022)
In the month of love, ironically a tryst of lovers turned into “strangers” at the climax of the poem (end of the romantic rendezvous) entitled “The Forge” by John D. Robinson. Then the surreal enlivened images in two poems, “Liberty Atoms 11 & 15,” by Christopher Barnes with quotes within them from the late novelist Iris Murdoch (The Nice And The Good) take flight like Cupid’s wings—”Birdcage alarm clock flew / Tick-reversed / An hour pursuant to every ten minutes.” (from “Liberty Atoms 11”). Further attributes of love and time exist in DS Maolalai’s poem, “Time takes pawns like a short game of chess” with the first line completed by two words, “everyone leaves.” His fresh and remarkable mixed metaphorical images are evident, especially “…and spiders / with legs / that bounce like bent paperclips…” This poem gives the reader a “bent” angle of the timelessness of time and lost love in a simple but loved object of a “…a cup and saucer / in your mother’s house. / kept whole for 20 years, / and cracked / and thrown away.” Lastly (but, by no means least), Louis Gallo’s “Tree” poem, where the speaker is witness to the loveless butchering of “a most magnificent oak tree” grieves the reader to heart’s core. “But this is the way it goes with the sacred.” North of Oxford hopes you enjoy reading our United Kingdom, Irish-Canadian, & American poets in this February 2020 issue.
North of Oxford 