Fairy Poems – Ploughing

Fairy Poems - Ploughing

Ploughing is one of my fairy poems, a celebration of all things gentle and delicate and of how the passing time springs bursts of colour and light.

Ploughing – Fairy Poems

Overnight, he went from babyface to tree-bark skin, and I wonder why the fairies ploughed his face, his three-day stubble pencilling a thin lawn and capricious red and yellow flowers blotching, him in the midst of squawls singing and a million fairies dancing. His heart – the passing beat whisking and wheedling the light his eyes are spilling onto the ground. Flowers grow. Orchids where he’s fattened calves and Jasmine in the furrow he’s been treading softly. Fairy fingers till skin, and no one knows they’re scattering flower pods and mulching the ditch. He raises the crystal wine glass to his lips, and I see fairy wings lightly tend kisses.

Ploughing, Anita Alig 2020

Littering Poems – The Flesh and Bone People

littering poems

As littering poems go, The Flesh and Bone People is a reflection on fragmentation and the need for integration as individuals and communities.

The Flesh and Bone People – Littering Poems

On a sill at dawn,
 when a flock of flesh and bone people
 are bowing out still,
 
a bird's sharp beak beckons and
 pecks a sesame seed the wind
 barrelled up from the burger joint
 
one mile down the road. The wind
 is kind like that, bowling rubbish
 to places where birds can feast. 
 
The litterers feed them, too, 
 ghosts anchoring in leftovers
 and harking back to flesh and bones,
 
hunger-jerked. Once, the ghosts
 plenished the shell. Now, we tan
 our skin, locked out and rootless
 
until the wick frays and the house
 comes tumbling. Jigsaw pieces 
 strewn, only a gloved, slow hand can
 
unpuzzle them now, sew, set, mend and
 blend our ghost with flesh and bone,
 traversing lollipops, taxes, beads,
 
scaffolding, and chains until, toil
 and oil no longer spoil the soil, 
 until the hour is ours. 

Snowflake Poem – On Being Legless

Snowflake poem - On Being Legless

On Being Legless is a snowflake poem, a relationship poem, a love poem, a poem about fragility and longing.

On Being Legless – Snowflake Poem

 Once in awhile, you attached them,
The legs you cut off summers ago. I
Don’t like remembering me with legs, the boots
Cladding yours now don’t hide the glare.
They blare the hanging on replay,

The crowd’s murmurs volumizing
The outline of the flesh-clad bones once
Strong like the thighs of a racehorse and
Now, I smell manure dissing your burning
Incense. Yes, the temple doors shall remain

Closed, no matter how long the dog keeps
Howling for more bones now, he’s chewed
My drumsticks. But you’re a hopeless revisionist.
I see that as I watch you walk your legs as if
It was spring, as if four foot of snow outside

Wouldn’t swallow what I gulped summers ago.
Do you not smell the violets and the sweet peas?
On my tongue the taste of gardenias and freesias
I see us racing the length of the field behind
The forest with all the squirrels and nuts,

All-day long. But those days’ light speed
Now weighs nothing to no one. On sustainability:
My mother told me some flowers blossom brightest
And wilt quickest and so did our legs, 
Our feet unfit for rooting. Still, 

You keep them at the back of your wardrobe
Buried but resurrectable. To you, hope is a thing
With wings spanning everywhere and everyone
Even us. That woman who made the headlines
Because she was dead for six hours

That’s you as you are now strutting and spreading
A haze of lavender and rose. They say smells bypass 
Reason like when a man and woman embrace
And fall into the breadth of joint breaths. But all I see is
Snowflakes drifting, no legs there either only 

Stillness and the gentlest dropping home, ground-
Bound, bound to bed and wed down on the skin of the
Earth whose longing is the length of where the sky
Meets the ocean. And all I can see is your legs

Prancing like a doe which makes me think of Christmas
Oxen, not turkey or ham and how he said it was, 
It is, all about love. In the street lights, snowflakes are
Stars, meteor showers who’ll melt and still, still

They bunch into a blanket as I hear the crunch when 
My boots trace what is, what has been, all the while 
Shooting grains of salt and dreams up into the sky. 
Somewhere between the surface and above and below,
snowflakes settle. 

 

Mother and Daughter Poem – The Guardian

Mother and Daugther Poem - The Guardian

The Guardian is a mother and daughter poem, a reflection on giving and receiving care and support.

The Guardian – Mother and Daughter Poem

 With a black biro, she’s drawing
a wave on the white page
mapping Mom’s waverings.
She spots peaks and valleys and floods cutting through.
Like yesterday
before she buried a tablet in her clenched fist.
Aged ten,
she’s learned how to read from Pudgy the dog.
My dog is very smart, you know, she told Belle at school,
he can tell the future, you know.
Belle laughed her off
this is another one of your stupid ideas, Lea.
She didn’t mind,
she knew she could rely on Pudgy
who’d chew the rug or tug her by the leg
before each trip south.
Sometimes,
they’d all have a picnic and enjoy the view from the mountain top.

Butterfly Poem – Love Is a Butterfly

Butterfly Poem - Love Is a Butterfly

Love Is a Butterfly is a celebration of the gentle nature of love, a butterfly poem and a reflection on beauty, fragility, and coherence.

Love Is a Butterfly – Butterfly Poem

Love is a butterfly nestling on your toe, 
and you see how the veins within its wings
branch perfume into the sky across
the earth's breasts and bones.

Never once does it falter in its fluttering,
never once does it bend a straw or pinch an eyelash.

And sometimes,
quite out of the blue,

the butterfly roars like a lion or
undoes equations
in a whisp of a whistle

all the while

smelling
like a meadow of a million flowers and a trillion cherry blossoms.

Now and then,

the butterfly whispers
songs of honey and clear springs

until the glistening pearls in its wake

make a trail for the frail,
its legs settling,
its spiracles blending blades and shades

for a miracle.

Wind Poem – Love’s Mending Ways

wind poem

Love’s Mending Ways is a wind poem, a celebration of love and all the wonderful ways it binds, fixes, and liberates.

Love’s Mending Ways – Wind Poem

Inside the earth’s heart and within its fire
the wind is moulding stars and goose quills
like the one, he’s dipping into the brimming vial.
Resting on his palm within the soft curling of his fingers,
the quill spills the ink and a river rises
beyond fields and oceans. And the wind is blowing
the ink as if shaping blue flowers and butterflies
beneath and across your warming skin,
bunching crumbs and binding what is fraying.
Like the girl next door or
me, when sand grits my iris or

the soil whenever potato blight sets in.
Last night, I saw the wind’s curling mouth around a fat straw.
And from the moon, it set free a flood of calligraphy
and a flock of geese, now laying feather down
into the overgrown hollow. Come early summer,
the gander’s quills will glide,
drawing sunflowers and love letters
between a sky-full of wind and a blue ink ocean.

Forest Poem – White Noise

Forest Poem - White Noise

White Noise is a forest poem, a celebration of leaves rustling and the power of trees. Next time you go to the forest, listen.

White Noise – Forest Poem

Among weeping leaves, the wind drinks drops of rain and 
clads the oily greens with the sun’s golden glow;
Below the weeping willow, nothing but white noise and
the earth’s mulch and shoots. We lay on the flat of our backs,
our eyes sown on heaving leaves, out of the blue, gurgling droplets
gushing down our cheeks. Were we weeping when
we could have been sleeping? Maybe she did not let us, maybe
they longed for us to hear the grace of branches
lifting and shifting back and forth around the willow’s silken trunk,
her arms drooping
to draw stars on blades and sing along the bud’s turquoise hymn
in the rain. Still swaying, the twigs sweep away the webs in
through our windows, I spot a bird jiving, another
gliding on the crown, now leaning east, then mouthing south
toward our skin. In between the shades of green,
we can hear the peppered blue and now,
the leaves are sleeves.

Poem about People – He Grinds His Teeth

poem about people - He Grinds His Teeth

He Grinds His Teeth is a poem about people and how everyone gets through life, some of us easily, some of us with great difficulty.

He Grinds His Teeth – Poem About People

He grinds his teeth, he doesn’t grit them like me or knaw the table like he once did while still travelling. And when he grins the wind blasts the back door wide open.

At times, you see a rosebush at the back of his throat where frogs may croak but here, rose petals settle his breath and birth velvet words to rival a soft day of mellow rain.

Between my molars, nothing but my jaw’s unrelenting or a woodchip whipping my nape into shape. Is time a grinding, a winding or a kneading? A gritting or a binding of people and places

weaving a cloak one would hope will clothe words so mouths be open and breaths knit us together, stitching pearls and bread into his bones, and mine, and yours?