The Heart

Like most things, we could have vanished

easily without fanfare, thought or care

Instead it was meant to be that we chose

to deconstruct each chamber, and not carefully

more like ripping a band-aid slowly from a partial

scab, more like dissection of the worst kind -

and yet in the background a hum of machines

whirring out the most beautiful music

reciting such words as 'love' 'respect' 'faith'

a poetry reading to a crowd of followers

that could not bear to hear the empty sound of flat-line.

- Debbie Calverley

Two Pennies (Crush)

A woman at a grave
Flowers in the field
A farm's reflection in a side mirror

Two pennies on a track
Two trains have stopped
Before their destinations

One points east, the other west
A cricket calls, another answers
A breeze ruffles the wheat heads

She stands between two tracks
The sun is gleaming, setting
across the iron backs

freight cars waiting to be told
stop and go - go and stop
She swears she sees him

Spinning under the signals
The wind blows in the ghosts
The whole world holds -

- Debbie Calverley

Storm Front

Storm clouds billowed creating cold fronts
in the small checkers of her dress, puffing
her pockets like an intruder, invisible
bellows held close to the fire.

The rain began to speak to the tin above
outside the day strobed and forked
into instants that almost seemed real
the taste of air like iron on the tongue.

A farmer’s daughter, she understood
language of land parched to the quick
could feel its pores open and close
a lover’s heart spread wide to sky.

The hair on her arms began to shiver
as the storm built itself bolt by drop
fields flattened like golden dominoes
drought released in one great gasp.

- Debbie Calverley

Fiddlehead

Between the clouds shaped into leaping terriers or fat hippos drinking long from a river of sky - fly little hidden time machines stamped with different dates exploring currents of past regrets or future hopes, each one unzipped spilling secrets into ears of lonely lovers, humming songs of unborn dreams held too close in the crook of a mother's arms. They will only reach the stars by thinking there is no distance between them; a quick turn towards a twinkle earth shrinks into a fiddlehead curled tight into the shape of its own gravity.