by Mandy Macdonald
I
let me know when you find
the right moment to
speak
your mouth is brown & black & blue-
grey pebbles of silence
hard as boiled sweets
hostile as the inarticulate cliffs lined up
like crested iguanas
as you go northward
through sheep and poverty
no-one gets much reward here. you take
what comes, without comment or complaint.
these rifted rocks are hardly
eloquent
but what if they split
violent volcanic
hurl sparks spit boulders
ignite again
the glaciated desire
that might have flowed like magma in our limbs
the day before yesterday
II
words and music
tick & drip of time passing eroding
precisely
cliffs and columns, pink
and yellow plaster
love affairs
white & rose & russet
marble stratified
above the beach we swam at
in the inn where we ate
zuppa inglese the night we arrived
a caged goldfinch hopped
bright pendulum
from end to end of one foot by two
of plaited wire
but didn’t sing
the hills rise up in me
bile and honey
liven this parched land into
gnarled vines flowing
breaking like surf
dionysus took ship
could’ve been from here
somewhere in these rocks
there are words
but you have to hunt
for the fracture
Mandy Macdonald lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, trying to make sense of the 21st and other centuries. Her work appears in many print and online publications in the UK and elsewhere. Her first collection, ‘The temperature of blue’ (www.bluesalt.co.uk), was published in early 2020.
Emerge Literary Journal 