#colette bryce

[p-isforpoetry]

Colette Bryce's "Turbines in January" performed by Jeremy Irons || Climate change poems

In 2015 actors including James Franco, Ruth Wilson, Gabriel Byrne, Maxine Peake, Jeremy Irons, Kelly Macdonald and Michael Sheen read a series of 20 original poems on the theme of climate change, curated by UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

"Turbines in January" by Colette Bryce

A thousand synonyms for wind make up your song. Those busy arms

may juggle any number of rumours going around: your Swish, for one—

they say it whisks the pool of sleep; that blades cut holes in the cloth of dreams;

that shadow-flicker makes of the sunniest day a speed-frame motion picture,

and panes of ice, which crystallize on your frozen wings, are flung when you turn

(one, it was said, had lodged like a glass fin in the roof of a camper van).

*

What’s to be done to keep your head in the clouds, your whirling one-track mind,

for the wingers and losers, raptors, plovers, gulls batted to the ground?

What’s to be done about your foot, electric root beneath an ocean floor

abuzz with armoured creatures charmed by your magnetic aura?

*

Like my brother’s distance-defying snaps, where the London Eye will rest

like a trinket in his palm or the Tower of Pisa bend to the slightest pressure

of an index finger, these turbines could be a row of daffodils

bordering a lawn, signalling the spring, as I reach my hand out

into the perspective, pluck one like a stem, raise it to my lips

like a child’s seaside windmill on a stick, and blow… Its earfolds fill and spin.

Source: Guardian Visuals, 2015

[inanimategrace]

Espresso

A minuscule bird clinging to a twig

is shredding a loop of knotted string

to a fibre-fuzzy mist in its bill,

a haze as soft as cotton wool

with which to line a nest no bigger

than this small cup I lift to my lips

while I wait for you in this little coffee shop

on the avenue, for such is April.

Colette Bryce from Selected Poems

[fluttering-slips]

Expresso A minuscule bird clinging to a twig

is shredding a loop of knotted string

to a fibre-fuzzy mist in its bill,

a haze as soft as cotton wool

with which to line a nest no bigger

than this small cup I lift to my lips

while I wait for you in this little coffee shop

on the avenue, for such is April.

[loveshounds]

I believe that Jesus lives deep in the ditch of my mother's ear,

an unreachable itch that never leaves. And I believe that Jesus breathes

a million microscopic hairs lean in the breeze like sapling trees.

Things I begin to tell her, I believe sometimes she cannot hear

for the whispering like wishes of Jesus softly breathing there.

Itch, Colette Bryce

[poem-today]

A poem by Colette Bryce

A Last Post

My ideal job? Inspector of the tideline, the ocean's eyebrow,

after the sea has sucked in its breath and closed its lashes. I'd live

in a wrecked Bishopean shack, the lion's paw prints massive in the sand, and always

in weather like this, in tattered old shorts and a vest, my skin salted.

A currency of driftwood and feathers, necklaces of wrack like cured leather,

I'd collect in a basket to barter with the wind. With shells and fish hooks,

alphabet of bird bone and twig, I'd fashion flotsam poems, in my utter

element, pottering along far from the roar and heat of politics.

Odd times, a hound might spring out of nowhere after a ball, an anoraked owner

in its wake; or I'd wave to the lone kayaker, buoyant always as a bath-toy in the waves,

but really, at home with my own company I'd be; barely curious enough

to track those trails of human spoor to the point at which they always disappear.

Colette Bryce

[nsantand]

Colette Bryce – Versão Inicial

"Versão Inicial", um poema de Colette Bryce

Nosso embarcação tardou a alcançar Betsaida; os ventos nos oprimiam,rápidos e gelados, e nossas mãos estavam cheias de bolhas dos remos.Tínhamos esgotado nosso estoque de canções e gracejos, com quilômetrosainda por percorrer, quando Jesus falou: disse que estava agachado na praia, sozinho, emuma prece silenciosa, quando, ao olhar para baixo, se surpreendeu –viu sua própria imagem ali agachada.…

Colette Bryce – Versão Inicial

[brianeno]

[seaanimalonland]

Nature Walk | Colette Bryce

If only my bag had been large enough, I would have brought the lonely men in parked cars by the river. I would have brought the woman dabbing kohl tears with the heel of her hand. I might have brought the ancient couple who read each word on the YOU ARE HERE board, then turned and ambled on, heads a little upward-tilted, showing an interest in everything.

I would have brought the coping-stone from the twelfth pier of the original bridge, and the 4:06 from elsewhere, curving (glittering) carefully across. And all the busy people on it: all their coats and phones and wallets. I might have brought the restless gulls that dropped like paper boats on to the water. And the burger van, the girl inside with greasy hair, her quite unsolvable crossword.

And put them all on my nature table, and fashioned little cardboard signs: a small display that would speak in a way about loneliness and life spans, parked cars and rivers.

I brought some bark, and a couple of conkers, one still half-encased in its skin like an eye.

Chosen by Carol Anne Duffy as one of her  Poems to get us through