Marion McCready: Four Poems

Marion McCready

  
 
Marion McCready lives in Dunoon, Argyll, with her husband and two young children. She holds an MA in Politics and Classics and an MLitt in Philosophy both from Glasgow University. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of publications including Poetry Scotland, Edinburgh Review, The Glasgow Herald, and Horizon Review. Calder Wood Press will be publishing a pamphlet of her poems in 2011.
 
 
 
Black Tulips
 
The waxy strap leaves supplicate
beneath each black cup.
Standing above,
 
even on this day,
I can taste the night air
on my breath.
 
Have you ever seen such dark gloves
cupping the heart of its sex?
The red-edged wings
 
of a butterfly burn
against the coal-dust tips.
Black tulips rise,
 
green stems slicing through the earth.
They bear the weight of dusk
on their heads,
 
each one a silhouette,
a burnt-out sun.
This bed of Persian bells
 
is emblazoned
on the garden of my eyes
while these ripe petal trinities
 
brush against the cream
of my legs.
 
 
First published in the Edinburgh Review, Issue 128
(December, 2009).
 
 
 
Bramble Street
 
They ripen to mosaics,
sweet stains hanging mid-air.
 
Then one by one
they succumb
 
like a family of suicides.
 
And when we pass
we pick the plump thumbs
 
that are left,
 
colour our teeth, our tongues
with their grief.
 
Yet no son has died here,
no father’s arms burn
 
with the weight of the dead
on Bramble Street.
 
 
First published in Poetry Scotland (December, 2009).
 
 
 
Eyewitnesses
 
Hoar frost trembles
at the edge of bramble leaves,
love letters to birds
in crystal.
 
“In another life
they ate my house with fire.”
 
Puddles crumble,
a sort of music, under my feet
and the white hills rise
from evergreens.
 
“You were my body armour
most of the night.”
 
The sun glows
through layers of cloud-dust.
Tree stumps flower
copper-autumn dreams.
 
“They came while we were eating,
they came in twos and threes.”
 
The river pulses
drowning these mysteries in eddies;
the voices, the words,
my muddied feet.
 
 
First published in Anon Magazine, Issue 7 (June, 2010).
 
 
 
The Red Road
 
The morning scent of spring
colours the sky
above the Red Road.
 
Son,
close your eyes.
 
Swallow this bitter butterfly,
let its wings expand in your throat
(as we tie ourselves together with rope).
 
Mother, father,
at cloud-height,
the clouds form crosses in the sky.
 
Son,
come.
God will catch us.
 
The frost-thumbed grass will cry
with our broken bones alone
(the furniture of our souls),
 
for we are citizens of the sky.
 
 
First published in Poetry Scotland (June, 2010).
 
 
 
Visit Marion’s blog.
 
Read Marion’s ‘The Cockle Picker’s Wife’ in the second issue
of Horizon Review.
 
Visit Poetry Scotland’s website.
 
Visit the Edinburgh Review’s website.
 
Visit Anon Magazine’s website.