Issue 9
December 2001
Peter Kenny
Peter Kenny lives in London, England. Having grown sick of poetry he spent a few years grinding his teeth, staring at walls and writing prose. Happily, 2001 saw him return to his first love --poetry-- all over again. For him, the year had two other writerly highlights. One was playing the part of a corpse in his play Wrong, and the other was starting AnotherSun which is an ezine worth visiting once you've fully enjoyed the delights of PW Review.
An adumbration of the Light Age
Scientists classify six creatures that lived in light:
Aardvark, elephant, carp, bee, bee-eater, and tern.
Their eyes were adapted to blinding conditions
Pupils clenched to pinpricks, eyeballs squeezed in sockets.
Life, scientists suggest, will persist in peculiar places
For this so-called Light Age stretched for millennia
Reigned over by a species of squinting hominid
Who flinched from blackness, and the comforts of night.
Their aggregations of rubble are irrefutable
But other signs of their passing are slight; token scraps
With unbreakable codes, unknowable categories
And glossaries of nonsense such as bright, colour and sun.
These perplex us with hints of a primitive ritual
That shunned shadow, and linked dark with death,
Bizarre beliefs which allowed no evolution, no self-expression,
No feeling for the two thousand and twelve textures of dark.
But surely they’d not recoil from the blaze of a sable fire?
Or hate the velvet days? And how in light did they stay sane?
Their light is gone, thank God; a static crackle that passed once,
At dark speed, into the vast pale voids between stars.
Book of Kells
And here we revere the marvellous book:
Vibrant lapis lazuli, crushed oak apples
Beetles’ wings and verdigris are sources
Of the colours that embellish its vellum.
Swans feathers in the dank scriptorium
Scratch out four pigmented Evangelists:
The lion, the calf, the eagle and the man.
And we, watchful for raiders, corporations,
Sea wolves, dumb-downers and thieves
Scribe on.
Christ is an olive tree, he is
A torpedo-shaped fish, he is a peacock...
We draw so many eyes to search for you
For we believe that Christ might seek and save
The victims of these overshadowed days.
City of London
Clouds build down into the building site
The quality of light flattens the jutting girders
Monotonises the movements of cranes.
In the paper a policeman displays an arms cache
People look away from the welder
Arc-eyed construction workers hide their faces
Traffic buries itself in growls.
On the top deck of a bus a man absorbs the city page
In the offices hands of girls from Brook Street and
Kelly Girl key in details of insurance.
The air stinks. The man next to me stinks of money.
He takes two pills for dyspepsia, it’s 9.03am
And the woman with no shoes is
Moved on from St.Pauls. In the clay of the site
Are ruins of old London. Archaeologists have two weeks
To understand what happened.
Headstone
A magpie feather, myself middle-aged
I bring my life to my father's headstone;
The feather, a momento of you uncaged
A showy minor mobster: name unknown.
How did my flown boy-father become a tree?
His roots dragged up one strange monument
This long-hidden, ant-ridden thing called me;
A big burly bastard who can’t relent.
Unrepentantly you stole from my life
My name and your roof, but now you’re rumbled
It's easy to blame you, now blame is rife
This is your headstone, I want you humbled,
You are the proper place; my origin
I must disinter you before I begin.