(In memory of my dad, Leslie Wanliss)

On the Sunday that he was buried

so that the curry goat don't run belly

Mama put on a heavy praying

So till she take to rocking

praying and supplicating

all at once

Then she whispers out she relief

ban' her belly

lef' Pa picture a' watch over we

Whisper, say him was a good man

that just never love God enough

to reach church after him dress

Groan how she could a' forgive him

then read two psalms,

for only God know the way an' the heart

of a man like Pa.

Then, in the spirit of things,

promise to deliver a proper chiding

if we ever behave like him.

- Lesley Ann Wanliss

Rain

Rain thunders in like the hooves of horses.

It beats down on the roof, a frenzied drumming

that soon, however,

subsides

to the sound of doves flapping their wings,

to kittens whispering through the grass.

Life does that too.

Sometimes the heart pounds,

and sometimes it pulses, so softly

you strain to hear the poems

drifting like feathers through the air.

- Ann-Margaret Lim

The Ravaged Isle

There is a place for poets where they ride

the bare backs of poems with an old wand

dipped to find the depth of some crude oil

and pressed to paper like knees to holy ground.

Our lives route there; the words we choose to script

are sticky tree sap beading the bleached bark,

while memory's wild vine overruns the mind

and secrets bloom, ruby in the pulsing heart

of a petalled room. The poet crouches here,

draped in metaphors behind the ribbed cage doors,

drawing verbs like sacred herbs to return

to the ravaged isle where sunset is a waxing seal,

and dusk envelops hoping,

and Courage and Dream are

young lovers eloping.

- Millicent Graham