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Poetry

Bruegel, Columbidae, and Walking Home

(Victor Moragriega)

“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.

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