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Broken lines

  • Posted on February 24, 2015 at 1:19 pm

I imagine the sky beneath your feet
being smoothed by the underbelly of the plane
and below that, the diminishing of sea
from mountains into ripples and glints.

Your ears hear nothing of this, your eyes
lose curiosity with the hours, the drift
between us to your disconnected places,
now turned summer, under alien trees.

I watch a tiny green gaming piece, which is
your plane on my screen, tracking a tracer of sky
vulnerable dashes on wide oceans, microscopically
teasing me to watch its infinitesimal play.

I sleep. Perhaps you do too, blanket and blinds,
unseeing each other—the line is lost and incrementally
I wake in your night to read you have sometime safely
landed, lost to miles, found on my phone, so far.

Today you tell me you are three thousand mountain
metres in the sky, the highest you’ve ever been with feet
on the ground while mine are flying to you lifted
with words of loving, fast as light but out of time.

I imagine Bogota under your shoes, its strange dust,
beautiful people, and money in case of robbers
held tight as your head fills with unfamiliar Spanish
routed via watchfulness and gratitude of home.

We touch each day, through fingertips, pressed down
in constantly-crossed messages, until the wires,
wound across continents, laid beneath oceans,
knitting our longings, our remoteness, become frayed.

 

2015 © Andie Davidson

All of it

  • Posted on January 21, 2015 at 12:42 pm

We shall know grief—
which is a funny thing to say
while we laugh, pause at anxieties,
only to smile them away.

We befriend joy—
which is to say not just fun
as our smiles drift from serious eyes
because love has begun.

We feel this rain—
not as birds on a lake unwet
but soaking into our consciousness
threads of how we met.

We shall each grow—
breaking husk and ground, with stems
thoughtless of seasons, and wear both
dew-drops and frost-gems.

We become whole—
in grief, joy, sun, frost as equal food
knowing somehow nothing less is true
nothing else as good.

 

2015 © Andie Davidson

Found images

  • Posted on November 1, 2014 at 12:49 pm

The sepia girl stares expressionless,
shuffled from the pack of brown mottled paper
in crisp white lace dress and Sunday shoes.
She’s young, innocent and a long time ago –
it’s the camera that says she cannot smile.
I imagine her jumping up and running free.

Next a military man, too young to fight,
a smaller square, a formal pose –
maybe the one before leaving on campaign.
He’s innocent too, unsmiling but proud
in uniform undisturbed by war.
I imagine him standing up and marching away.

Now a grey-tone picture of an older man,
and he is grey too, gravity of age, no smile
in suit and tie, tall starched collar, cane.
Nothing in his stiff upper lip betrays his life –
his wars and wages pushed it deep inside.
I imagine him staying there when all have left.

‘That’s your great grandfather’, she called.
‘All of them. Yes, I know – the dress.
They all did. Such pretty boys that
went to war, to colonies, to banks –
trading British manliness for all their lives.
I imagine they forgot their growing days.’

‘I wouldn’t look at those’, she called.
‘Erotica is as old as the camera – or paint!’
The tiny prints scatter on the table,
ivory nudes, draped in studios –
nature for the discerning gentleman.
I notice one is different, lift it up.

There’s a coy sepia smile in this one,
unblemished by time, rarely seen by light.
In elegant gown, jewels, upright, proud –
and innocent too. On this rare occasion
inside out, this one true picture of him.
I imagine he remembered the lacy dress.

 

2012 © Andie Davidson

Tiller hand

  • Posted on September 17, 2014 at 9:29 pm

tiller hand   on polished wood
imbued with salt   worked
a partnership   seaward or home
familiar   this practical bond
shared   between many
tillers   hands
 
so present   comfortable
her hand   on my knee
a reassurance   leaning, home
familiar   this practical bond
shared   between many
sisters   hands
 
toes, connected   knees
shoulders soft   strong
a belonging   through journeys
familiar   this practical bond
understanding   we need
tillers   hands
 
tell her hand   on polished knee
salted by eyes   she steers
a journey   no harbour, no beach
familiar   this practical bond
because we are   many
sisters   islands

 

2014 © Andie Davidson

Hold this day

  • Posted on July 27, 2014 at 4:09 pm

This poem, also from my collection Realisations, predicts the feeling of completing surgery, even before I began living full-time in my authentic gender. Would it be like this? I didn’t read it for a very long time, I actually thought it a bit presumptuous. I read it two days after coming home from hospital. I cried. I would not rewrite a single word.

Hold this day, this birth day
write it in your diary, send me cards.

Never has a vaginal passage
delivered such a child as this –

she is an inversion of another
a restoration, a renaissance.

And this is her day, emerging
without cries, or protest, or recoil

but claiming birth-right almost
in defiance of everything umbilical –

with pain, blood, trauma and delivery
come to claim her world, her way.

Waking, ethereal, calm, complete
from mists of anaesthesia, almost in

disbelief at her prior parent, pregnant
with this progeny lain so long –

a gestation – no, an indigestion,
an indignity of containment.

I grasp this day, this birth day
red date in every diary, calendar

every future memory, mark and
milestone – and slip into life.

 

2012 © Andie Davidson