
“And then a tide of blood fell back in me/after that I walked with open ears/I found that the trees had voices, and/they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.”
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Battle Between Carnival and Lent (1559)
I imagine them in mud, steaming people, bony
hands joined to the land, farming with fingers
clawing furrows in the earth, dreaming of rain.
Someone begat someone who begat someone, who
begat someone else (etc) then you and I which means:
look down and see them in a puddle’s rainbow.
Bruegel showed them wearing clean and bright clothes, with
wimples white, and horns on their caps, and masks
leering, cups spilling, playing dice, dancing.
Memento vivis: taste a thousand years
in a cup of wine, eternity in bread
there’s a harvest festival in our blood.
Columbidae
Ice picks on black ice, scrabbling
the slate roof, my skull trepanned
lying in my teenage bed, coddled
listening to pigeons.
They were rock doves once, they lived in
cliffside roosts pecking sea salt spray
gathering hedge-berries inland
flying home by lay lines.
Cooing that sounds like cruel repeated
I feel honoured, like they have
gathered here to bow their heads
over me in feathered prayer.
We made them, or maybe say this:
we unmade them and we broke them
moulded their wildness and turned it
into a hopeless love
then abandoned them. Pigeons are
broken pieces of our scattered
conscience. Listen to them, up there
gathering again.
Walking Home
On my walk home a tunnel of trees
narrow and enfolded, shifting green
in summer shimmering, tectonic
blue magma breaking through leaf fault-lines.
For a long time I walked home in sound
ears plugged with New York, Detroit, London
tape-hiss stroking cochlea, finger
on spring-loaded moulded plastic button.
In winter the tunnel was dark, tactile
the trees were stripped and shivering
an idea of giants overhead, sighing
eyes closed or open, I walked the same.
And then a tide of blood fell back in me
after that I walked with open ears
I found that the trees had voices, and
they sang like forgotten, sunless seas.
I know that something has gone from me
I don’t know what it is or where it went
I used to walk home gladly, with light steps
there was a last time, but it went unmarked.
I think of my parents at the far side
of that tunnel of trees—summer, winter:
the place the beginning seems to be
is where you will find the end.
Joseph Hunter is a fiction writer and poet based in Manchester in the United Kingdom. His writing has appeared with Fairlight Books, Crocus Books, and Willows Wept Review. He teaches at the University of Manchester, where he is completing a PhD. He is co-editor of The Manchester Review.