Logo
Logo

GRACE LEA

Commended - 2023 Tower Poetry Competition, 'The Planets'

 

Three Children

She stands at her bedroom window;

the mill-wheel turns beneath the sill.

Above her, the planets shift in the open darkness.

She follows them with her mind

to the place where the sunbeam dwells,

where the sun-swept surface swells;

the river ripples and purls

—it holds the sky—

and gleams like the scales of a fish.

The great hands dip their knitting needles into the water, and

knit one, purl one, drop one, curl one, and

draw the stars out into silver threads—

the flash in the wave, the spidersilk stave.

 

Now he looks upwards, as she will.

His sister is asleep on her rush mat.

She murmurs about birds

in the language they will call Old Low German.

He once saw a figure carved from whalebone,

but this is more than that.

His face, that sun-swept surface, returns the moon’s light

—a pearl—

and so holds the sun’s light, reflected:

on this evening, he is a moon in his own right.

And the wind sings, like a knife in the air, and sails;

he looks at the stars in all their sudden beauty,

in all their searing splendour,

and they are more than that ever was.

 

This girl has no name. She

dips her hand into the powdered ochre.

Tonight, she will give the auroch and the ibex something to run under;

she will give their brindled forms something to see,

and their ivory horns something to curve up towards.

She draws her hand across the rock,

she paints in dappled red and amber,

she draws the band of light that stretches across the sky—

she wants to capture its sudden beauty, for it surprises her every time—

and she paints what she has seen.