Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One November-December 2024
Energy on the wing, poems by Ian Watson.
Energy on the Wing
1
Blackbird in the pear tree’s having a panic attack;
three pigeons huddle next to the shed.
The ruffled corbies up high on the roofs
of the main road on the dyke are hunched.
Not a hum or a whizz, the bees are abed,
but the birds are burning joules; they feel the storm.
2
Like hundreds of boys and girls on bikes,
the geese chatter and honk above the roofs.
They will cover thousands of miles to Morocco
their talk is travel announcements, I am told –
instructions for the change of pilot and cabin crew.
How many calories vanish in panic or flight?
And there is nothing in the ocean they can eat.
Night Candle?
for Miriam Otto
Nachtkerze –
the German has a Victorian ring to it,
Dickensian, this balm on my skin.
The English, when I found it, was an alien concept
like cucumber sandwiches, coffee, wine, grass snakes and
village greens were to me as an Ulster child,
known only from books from England.
Miriam fills me in on the scurrilous details.
‘There’s a lot you could do with this: it opens only at night;
it will heal you, it will get below your skin.
And they say there are poisonous varieties.’
The lady is a closet vamp. This prim river beauty,
this shrinking violet, this modest wallflower,
so prim and anonymous by day, so self-effacing,
wastes her charms on the darkling beetle and the moth
oblivious to her bright to deep pink lipstick.
In the morning she creeps back into her vampire coffin.
Chamerion latifolium
Evening Primrose
Train #37, Québec–Ottawa
Each approaching crossing is foretold
by three long phantom cries;
a careless motorist would be instant toast.
The rash of red lights flashes past
on the lurching walk to the loo.
Each rumbling crisscross bridge
reveals a rush of foamy rapids
wadeable to waist or maybe only knee.
Each leaping current wider than the Rhine
is just a minor pipeline under the tracks.
Feeders feeding bigger feeders through the pines
tumble down to Trois Rivières.
I blink and see a stooped fur trader stumble,
slipping with his wild-eyed cayuse,
a hundred years ago on rocks he has to footfeelfind
in shallows far too white for trout or pike
on his laborious western trek.
© Ian Watson
Ian Watson is originally from Belfast but lives in Bremen, Germany. He is the author of two poetry collections in English, the latest being Granny’s Interpreter (Salmon Poetry 2016); a further collection with Salmon, Somewhere, Far Away, a Radio, is forthcoming. His recent German-language non-fiction includes Spielfelder: eine Fußballmigration, on football and identity, and Bremen erlesen, a literary and cultural guide to his second-home city in Germany (both with Edition Falkenberg). He also publishes translations of poetry from and into German and English. He has worked regularly for radio and also made the film Cool to be Celtic for German and French television (arte 1999). He is a steering committee member of the Literaturhaus Bremen.