Subscriber Showcase #2
Zanna Beswick
Zanna Beswick is a university lecturer, director and consultant in dramatic literature and theatre. In British television she has over 200 credits as producer/story editor of British broadcast drama. As a poet she has been published in The Independent, Resurgence, The International Times, The French Literary Review, Chrysalis, Caduceus and several anthologies. She has read at the Cheltenham Festival, Torbay International Competition, Rochester Literary Festival, Bath Literary Festival, Wells Literary Festival, The Richard Jeffries Museum and others. At the moment she is in transition towards writing full time.
Refugees
The London plane tree has two leaves left:
one is a bird about to fly south,
the other a bright sear flag in breeze.
Brief sun lights them up, abandons them,
as refugees from plenitude, from summer.
All you need is to imagine this:
two children hanging on to last lifelines
of their family tree, dispersed, naked,
lost in the forest of war
and now exposed, lit up by loneliness.
How is it that we see these things
but turn back to the small screens
where we keep up
with our own so-important news?
We wade through the dried leaves of autumn.
Watch with me tonight; stay and watch
into the small death hours
where meteors and satellites scour skies
with their great metallic weights,
when fox and owl own cities;
wait for the last two leaves
to let go their final hold on ‘home’,
spiral into the obscure tides
dehydrated, cast adrift, untellable.
A leaf for a life.
‘The International Times’, ed. Loydell, 2017
Knowehead, County Antrim
But going with Jimmy was something else entirely.
It meant ‘out the back’ surely, but nothing smutty:
it was amongst the turkeys, still unfeathered,
queer little mites to be fattened for Christmas,
now just blethering under the electric light bulbs
with big eyes on them and bat-skin wings,
all crushing together in the artificial warmth
- they could look to themselves, Jimmy said always.
But the smell was fetid grain in a windowless cell.
And next door the stables with unpractised hunters,
fat on the grass, needing to be fit for the season.
Everything in its time: the raspberries glistening on canes
in the fruit garden, the old plump roses
to be picked for table before the sun’s on them.
In the yard, the leathery tack room: ‘a bit throughother’
he would say, ’cos he’d been cleaning the bridles
and snaffles when Mrs Barr called with his tea
and it was good craik with Mrs Barr, sure it was -
but there now, what was it you were saying,
could youse ride the blighters? Why yes, surely,
ride youse back or front!’ So we saddled up
and were off down the old Ballygarvey Road,
hooves clicking on tarmac, over Buttermilk Bridge,
out onto the moor with nothing but wind ahead of us,
the bay throwing his heels in the air for the joy of it
and the chestnut frisky over the stone walls.
And going with Jimmy was something else entirely now.Above Lamorna Cove
And a great sound that might have been Rilke’s song
rose up over the mud-stubbled field
as though the sussuration of the seas
poached the land for a sigh’s length,
brought its waters over the cliff
reminding us of when they covered the earth
and will do again, soon now, soon now
and the breath flocked up in wings
for it was birds after all, fieldfare
lifting from the soil in a dark arc of feather
that seemed one only, all quills bent
to the thermal in an instinct of journey,
the sure imperative of the avian;
as though the once-ordered seasons will be infinite.
‘Diamond Cutters’ ed. Harvey & Ramsay (Tayen Lane, USA, 2016)
April, Stratford-on-Avon
First foot-ferry of the year
he says,
cranking chain in the flat hull;
heaves his passenger
across this small rubicon
of north bank
to civic south.
The river splits
the frost in spring
exuberance.
Last dark twigs
hang back over the water.
Perhaps they hide
from this sharp imperative,
the cracking apart
of fly-paper buds,
the unstoppable opening of hands.
Lovely words!