Dodo Eraser

His blood is Still

Two buckled brogues step
into the eye of a giant squid.
It blinks and the austere Austrian boy
of 12 years with a blond quiff descends
apathetically into a drowning iris.
The boy sinks into, then through
a blackness, deep, womb silent,
death accepting, grief nourishing.
He slips down easily, like hemlock across
A toboggan tongue.
Inside the centre he witnesses his own birth.
He cries like the child he just was.

Sparrow

I lassoed an eyelash from the closed eye of the moon.
A Sparrow darted between the hailstones released
from the long throat of the sky.

Fleeing from the winter’s sleep,
sparrow I call you, using the lexis of twig, of bark
of sun-dried moss, clamped to roots whose fingers
choke the earth and spread deep, wide and free through
soil, long trodden on by boots
carrying skin-draped skeletons that once goose-stepped
through the forest, now silent —
a dream overflowing green,
bathed in the deep sung light
that ushers newborns into the cathedral of the sky.

Born of autumnal darkness, descending upon
an early evening scene,
steel towers gauzed by electric light,
birthed from a billionaire’s picked nose
and a worker’s first and last sigh and of course
the fear of death woken in the
slapped bottom cry of a baby’s first notes
through a winter strangled sky.

I could not speak of you, if I could not speak the whole of me,
if I can’t unite the waters that surround my sinking moon?
How could our voices harmonize into the stars that fall like
leaves to mulch the sky into the dirt?

In deep dreams of the long night, you appear;
a flit of shadowed wing and an acorn tasting eye,
that swallows anxiety,
even when my always fracturing mind
conjures up grey suited men,
with tongues of salmon scales,
who melt like wax and dribble down wood dry skin –
you arrive a quiet observer, an anchor,
from the waking world – a saint, brown-feathered
helping me live a good life
rather than just dying a good death
which is easy
though it forms legends
that makes men kill
and women laugh.

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“Doctor Lazarus,” a narrative poem, was David Hay’s first published piece. Since then, his work has appeared in numerous journals. He has a collaborative piece, Amor Novus / A Spontaneous Prayer published with Soyos Books, Saxon Suites by Back Room Poetry. His novel How High the Moon is available from Anxiety Press and his debut poetry collection is out now with Ballerini Book Press.