Poems by Selina Whiteley
“Thorned Silences”
By
Selina Whiteley
I imagine you back at the
allotment,
carrots,peas, potatoes, roots
that splay
through the dark earth, knit
a new foundation.
And I think how, on your
way homeward,
you’d stop to clear the
brambles from walkways,
move their barbed stalks to
clear a path for others.
Then another memory. You picking
blackberries,
their lustrous juice too much
like blood,
their briar too much like fresh
lacerations or scars
when the image of cattle being
led to slaughter
doesn’t leave your mind. The
berries, like the guilt
of doing nothing,
stains your fingertips.
The tragedy catches in your
vocal cords like thorns.
“That Broken Month”
By
Selina Whiteley
Cloud underbellies
were fecund with final daylight
throughout the unbroken months
of night-wet winter.
On the earth of that December
dusk,
she’d stood mesmerized,
the kicking infant enlivening
her body,
pleating her flesh.
The May sun shone on the bramble
thickets
that clawed the shed
as she’d forced out that sack of
flesh
for gloved hands to extract him.
All that day, he’d warmed
against her
glossy in the Spring’s untrodden
grass.
His eyes staring at the elms
greening and thickening in the
light.
Fern leaves shadow the soiled
ground.
She stares beyond the turbulent
river
to where the bell tolls
as he enters the slaughter.
“Russet Morning”
By
Selina Whiteley
A solitary magpie
draws up the sky,
as I write in black ink
on white paper.
I hope to see
another magpie -
the darkness is full
with dualities.
It is hard to envisage
a morning
without both birdsong
and nightmare.
In this monotone dawn
the image is spiky,
refined -
Awakened,
the rustic dawn
is barbed with reality.
And alone,
the magpie screeches,
at the departed night.
The foundation,
of the whole, friable earth
crumbles into the abyss
It’s difficult not to cry
when even the saplings
of dreams seem thick
with tragic magpies
in spheres of loneliness.
The stench of blood on the
tongue.
- Selina Whiteley is an animal
rights activist and environmentalist. She has poetry widely published in two
books, "The Kaleidoscope Chronicles" and "Up to Our Necks
in it," and in a number of magazines. As an undergraduate she studied Creative and
Professional Writing from the University of Glamorgan in Wales, UK, and is
currently studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Teeside,
in the UK.
Copyright©2020 by Selina
Whiteley. All Rights Reserved.