Julie Sampson – 2 poems

So many winter poems

            

Angels and voices

in those infinite skies

suspended like twigs

over ice-green trees

behind the silver birch

above eaves and roofs –
            

a lichen language

only understood by the crowing child,

who, escaping indoor’s flashing screens

watches sky’s empty theatre ignite with stars –

Kay and Gerda’s glittering sleigh is whizzing past.

Arms extended to greet the cold, cocooned

within the sheltering fables of his wintry make-believe.

He escapes wind’s icicles.

            

Inside the overheated house

grownups chew finger-ends,

bite their lips

and tap each dawning line of every new poem

onto the lit-up screens.

This is the Crisis of their time

and they must let the algorithms spill out,

up and out of their system.

            

Hooray

            

It’s your next session of messy play –

just allow the app to crash

and put away the print

the parts of speech

the current issue of Poetry Review.

Leave Unfinished Business.

            

Listen instead to the thrum of blood inside your head

that inner pounding of the heart,

            

allow your pen to play by ear, watch it self-indulge –

the exotic prosodies,

irresistible the gravitational pull to the black hole

where the last surviving band of poets 

                                    play out their compulsions 

pulse them into the zone of singing singularity.

            

Julie Sampson edited Lady Mary Chudleigh’s Selected Poems, 2009 (Shearsman Books) and a poetry collection, Tessitura, was published by Shearsman, in 2014.  It Was When It Was When It Was was published by Dempsey & Windle, in 2018. Sampson’s work was highly commended in the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize, in 2019.