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the poet
Poet Rachel Deering lives in Bath, England, with her cat, and works in the field of mental health supporting those who are homeless. She has a love of the natural world and what it can tell us about ourselves. Rachel is a director of writing website ABC Tales – where she also shares her own new poetry under username onemorething. She supports Signe Maene with Book Worm Saturday on Twitter, and can also be found tweeting poetry, art, nature, myth, folklore plus photos of her cat from her own account. Her first poetry collection is Crown of Eggshells.
the poems
Crow
My heart is a crow,
its wingbeats, a pulse;
the doctor declared it
a medical impossibility, but
these pills are seeds, I said,
and this hospital bed,
the black earth.
Krähe, I called it – its name,
the bark of its sound, ‘yes,’
I lie, ‘yes, every morning now
seems to be a bright welcome
to life.’ I am used to saying yes.
In laboratories, crows
have demonstrated their magic –
this is how I wield stone
to make water, this is how
I bend metal to make food.
A doctor diagnoses, and
I try to hush the night
sung inside my chest,
of battles and their fields
of dead, I do not tell anyone
‘no’, I understand cras,
I understand how to endure
today for the liberty of tomorrow.
The Dead Want
Their Moon Back
The toad winked an eye
into the side of his head,
unrolled his tongue
and snatchgulped slippery
the lozenge of a slug.
The darkness said –
do not steal the moon
or the dead will find you
and fetch it back,
their pearly stone,
their lifeless rock.
Dew settled upon
the toad’s cratered back,
the seas no longer ebbed
and flowed,
owls were struck dumb.
I weighed the night
on the scales of absence
until nothing was or
ever could be marvellous
anymore,
I cut the moon
into new quarters,
I buried the light.
Salamander
When it rained, you blamed me,
and when your cattle died or
the well gave up bad water –
it was all my doing. So much so,
that now you do not speak my name,
fearing its mustard breath
will flame a pouched poison and
released, will fire and hiss if uttered.
But I have never been that mysterious.
Still, I speak in little clicks, undaunted,
mutter the meaning of each star
upon my back, upon the worm of my body.
And I swim in the murk of aquatic dreams,
sinewy, watered beneath the smell
of pinewood warmed in the sun. Here,
you ask me to put out the blaze I started
and yet, I only know the cool of wet and stone.
I think of the soft, round of my eggs,
sticky as creamy mistletoe berries, and
what if I could change my skin,
regenerate the broken parts,
so that when, scales falling away,
I can reveal the white dove of my virtue,
and how then, maybe then,
you might again see the truth of me.
Publishing credits
All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb