Poetry
poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence ~ Audre Lorde
Making Up With the Sun
We need to make up with the sun,
Did I do something wrong?
When we talk about the daylight hours that we are robbed of
on our commute home
Is that why I feel so alone?
The coloured houses share in my sympathy.
They look back at me
They know how I want to go so desperately
To see them
To be filled with the same energy
When life is in grayscale
I come back in Picasso’s colour
(Sharp yet soft
A blend of sorts)
Bright and lovely.
Paintings and you always go together.
Merging like oil paints in the caveats of my memory
How I want to be there so desperately
On top of the molar hills of sickly-sweet greenery
How life felt like a 1920’s Weimar movie
A golden era
I think, as I walk back from the station.
Unable to mention how I feel.
Lips tightened; sealed.
Just like your grasp
Loosely tight
Supposedly comforting in the speckled evening light.
Where was I?
Back to this conversation which reminds me of you.
How I predict that you would agree
That the phrase sounds interesting
‘Making up with the sun’
Making up with you
How desperately I wish things didn’t end
When they had just begun.
by Pippa Hill
LIFE OF THE PARTY
You danced all night,
Avoiding the echoes of their words,
So you didn’t have to talk to them,
You loved it, alright,
To forget the fright of your life.
One day you wake up,
Withered, water-less, without any makeup,
And there’s no one to make up for what they did,
You blame yourself as you insist
that it wasn’t your fault,
They locked you in the vault.
In the maze of the sound waves, you lose yourself,
The light in the eclipse has come,
And it feels like spring has just begun,
You’re reborn,
A new woman?
Suddenly you’re the little girl at the party,
Looking around,
Eyes darting,
Mouth filled with sand you danced to the sound
Of psychedelic bubbles you didn’t want to burst.
And the crows look on above the corpse,
But they can’t see the open coffin that you have walked out of,
Out into the glitterball of life,
Where you dazzle and they frazzle,
Can’t bear to see the flaming candle.
The blazing candle,
And they wait for it to flicker,
But it never dimmers.
The pencils of their fingers reach for the warmth,
Whilst the rubbery words try to erase the yolk,
The wax drips down into my eyes,
Milky white droplet lies,
Fitting when we were in Bath,
But they cool eventually from the
altitude of the pedestal you placed me on,
The hill you insisted we walked on.
Like the Madonna,
I knew you were gonna lead to something magnificently terrible,
Or terribly magnificent,
The rose and the serpent,
Twisting around my ankle and up the hills of my thighs,
You found secrecy in the coves of the candlelight,
When you turned off the lights,
And I lay there in doomingly apprehensive stage fright,
The little girl at the party,
Looking around,
Eyes always darting,
Mouth filled with sand I danced to the sound
Of psychedelic bubbles I wished would burst.
by Pippa Hill
The Children of Yemen
They cry before they learn to smile,
In the eye of the bloody storm,
The children of Yemen,
They play in the rubble adorned with
concrete toys belonging to boys in governments,
Who value money over man,
The slaughter over the lamb,
And the land over famine.
As they take their last breaths,
Their mothers are behest with the rancour
of rockets that fly ahead,
Keeping them awake when they sleep in their beds,
They imagine another life where they can eat food and bread,
And not worry about the daggers that drop
from the sky,
Whilst they whisper their last prayers to the shining power up high.
But God will not save them from the static deserts,
Where rows of stony slabs make morbid pavements,
Yet we forget the Holy infants that lie beneath,
As we sit in our living rooms sipping milky cups of tea,
Whilst we waste the abundance of what we have,
May we remember the children of the golden sand.
by Pippa Hill
Pippa, I'm Disintegrating
Pippa, I’m disintegrating
you say to me,
I’m not the way I used to be,
Not slightly.
And all I can see is people
who flash their life,
Whilst I can barely walk here, melting under
the molten yolk of the summer light.
The slathers of your cheeks shiver as you speak,
And you find it hard to get the words out,
It’s a squeak,
And all the seagulls you spend your time
shouting at,
I wish I didn’t bother getting worried,
I’m bad at that.
You call me and you call me all the time,
Whilst you forget I’m sitting upstairs on the telephone line,
But I don’t mind that the beads of your memory
have disintegrated completely,
Just being here with you is a lovely eternity.
by Pippa Hill