Jacquelin Saphra

Poetry

1. / Sonnet XX - 11th April 2020

   

   

   ENGENG

   'New York City officials have hired contract laborers to bury the dead

   in its potter’s field on Hart Island as the city’s daily death rate from 

   the coronavirus epidemic has reached grim new records in each 

   of the last three days.' Reuters

    

   The men are digging trenches. The drones

   are on the move, filming, marking the day:

   new graves to hold the homeless bones

   of the diseased, unloved, unknown, unclaimed.

   The dead are wrapped in body bags, then placed

   inside the coffins, names scrawled on the lids.

   The men-for-hire stack up the bodies, laid

   in rows three deep. Earth will cover this

   the way she always has. The plague has come

   again; the mother of us all cradles her dead

   and weeps. We cannot feel it. Rapt in the hum

   of drones, we hover, doubting, overhead.

   Surely that toytown island can't be real:

   its men in yellow, black earth, charnel fields.

2. / Sonnet LXV 5th June 2020

   

   

   ENGENG

   'UK passes 40,000 Coronavirus deaths' BBC News

    

   The Sad is feeling it today, it's had enough. 

   The Sad is feeling bad for being sad, but no,

   don't talk at the Sad and tell it to buck up

   when the Sad is falling into its own shadow.

   Don't give the Sad the third degree. It runs

   with pain, it bonds with fear and faith, it gets

   to grips, applies the balm of sorrow to its own

   beleaguered eyes. The Sad will not accept

   comparisons, knows only soft strands

   of itself, the briny reaches of the soul.

   The Sad understands; it lies down in the hot land

   of the heart and weeps: it keeps you whole,

   it does the human work. Hold tight. Believe

   the Sad, give it some air and let it breathe.

3. / Sonnet XXII 13th April 2020

   

   

   ENGENG

   'Home Secretary Priti Patel insists there is support available for at-risk women 

   as charities report massive increase in calls' The Guardian

    

   And back to rage again; distilled, confined,

   it finds new entrances. Somewhere, a woman

   shakes between four walls, her days unwind

   like rope, love's noose, as daily bulletins

   parade their numbers, not her numbers. Twisted,

   silent, somewhere in a hothouse room,

   a man is letting go, finding his fists.

   The social offers: hashtag you are not alone,

   the cops are out on call, sirens streak the night 

   with platitudes: be safe, go home, stay home.

   But home is gormless, earless, voiceless, blind,

   it lets the blood rush in, it lets the curse run on 

   and beyond mercy, behind some frozen door

   a man parades his shame, another woman falls.

4. / In the winter of 1962 my mother

   

   

   ENGENG

   gathered up her baby her trembling soul

   climbed into the Mini my father had bought 

   as penance for his bad behaviour drove 

   until she found herself on Hyde Park Corner 

   travelling round and round in shrinking circles 

   not sure how to execute the move outwards 

   into another lane never having been 

   properly taught how to make an exit

5. / All My Mad Mothers

   

   

   ENGENG

   My mother gathered every yellow object she could find:

   daffodils and gorgeous shawls, little pots of bile 

   and piles of lemons. Once we caught her with a pair 

   of fishnet stockings on a stick, trying to catch the sun. 

    

   My mother never travelled anywhere without her flippers, 

   goggles and a snorkel. She’d strip at any opportunity: 

   The Thames, The Serpentine, the shallows of a garden pond, 

   a puddle in the park. She was no judge of depth.

    

   My mother was a dipterologist, sucking fruit flies through a straw.

   Our house was filled with jars of corpses on display. Sometimes 

   she’d turn them out, too dead to flee, their wings still glinting, 

   make them into rainbow chokers, for our party bags.

    

   My mother barely spoke between her bruises: 

   her low cut gown was tea-stained silk, and from behind 

   her Guccis or Versaces, she would serve us salty dinners, 

   stroke a passing cheek, or lay her head on any waiting shoulder.

    

   My mother was an arsonist. She kept a box of matches 

   in her bra, lined up ranks of candles, ran her pretty fingers 

   through the flames. At full moon, she would drag 

   our beds into the garden, set them alight and howl.

    

   My mother was a fine confectioner. We’d come upon her sponges,

   softly decomposing under sweaters in a drawer, or oozing  

   sideways in a filing cabinet. Once, between her pearls 

   and emerald rings, we found a maggot gateau, iced with mould.

    

   My mother was so hard to grasp: once we found her in a bath 

   of olive oil, or was it sesame, her skin well slicked.

   She’d stocked the fridge with lard and suet, butter - salted 

   and unsalted - to ease her way into this world. Or out of it.

6. / My Friend Juliet’s Icelandic Lover

   

   

   ENGENG

   He floated in through the window

   on an ice floe, pissed as a puffin. I sheltered 

   inside my flannel nightgown

   like a Victorian chaperone and trembled

   as he exhaled north wind into the room.

    

   While he wrapped you in reindeer furs

   you begged me to stay close, whispered 

   you found him repulsive, smelling 

   as he did of Brennivin and hákari: you shuddered 

   at his ghost-white skin, his hairy face.

    

   He was a theatre director from Reykjavik 

   and you were prim and pretty 

   with a modest acting talent

   and a long term boyfriend who was 

   perennially unaware.

    

   You were steeped in English waters, 

   with your permanent pearls and that neat way

   you had of sitting with your legs crossed

   as if to emphasise what lay

   hidden between them

    

   and you listened through the soft 

   and falling curtain of snow

   as he pronounced the reasons why you should. 

   With him. And why the Fat Friend 

   who'd never get a man 

    

   should go back to her room before 

   she broke her teeth

   with chattering and how you'd never tried a Viking, 

   had you, Juliet, never heard the word for fuck 

   in Old Norse.

    

   And still I stayed because you asked me to.

   I even forgave you 

   after I went home to London for a fortnight 

   because of the pneumonia,

   and came back to find you 

    

    

    

   topless, glowing, perched 

   on that blue, blue glacier wide enough 

   to fill the narrow hall,

   and the flat filled with the smell of him:

   putrefied shark, sulphur, crowberry and ice.

7. / Hampstead 1979

   

   

   ENGENG

   He says he's a Gemini too,

   always wears white linen 

   to parties and is a recreational 

    

   heroin user in an open 

   relationship. He whispers 

   lunch and writes his number 

    

   on a £1 note and yes 

   on a rainy Friday he buys me 

   real champagne at Sheekey's, 

    

   feeds me oysters with his fingers

   pays with the dregs 

   of his overdraft. 

    

   All night he toys with me limply 

   but lovingly on the floor of

   my childhood room 

    

   and when The Girlfriend 

   arrives to pick him up 

   the next morning as arranged 

    

   but two hours early and his tongue

   is confusingly in my ear

   it falls to my early-rising mother 

    

   to open the door and offer tea 

   and conversation to The Girlfriend

   who admires my mother's

    

   easy way with the I Ching 

   and spider plants, falls in love with 

   her collection of African beads

    

   and new alfalfa sprouter and

   (my mother tells me later) is slimmer 

   than I am, with longer hair.

8. / Poland, 1985

   

   

   ENGENG

   And the facades of Warsaw bared 

   their scrubbed-up skins; liveried waiters 

    

   offered nothing on the menu; bath water 

   rusted; the country roads were calm

    

   a past I sought long overgrown

   the state of currency still volatile

    

   human traces vague, all guesses wild.

   Nothing left to find; nothing and no-one.

    

   But oh, the language: soft-tongued

   apologetic; those legends of tracks  

    

   pointing towards infinity; haystacks

   horse-drawn carts; disappearing villages

    

   where elders with wizened sensibilities

   surely hungry for redemption would 

    

   offer water, sanctuary and bread.

   Perhaps they remembered. Perhaps

    

   going about their rural business

   they thought of all those trains; night

    

   and day, the passing of human freight.

   But then again, perhaps not.

9. / Before the War

   

   

   ENGENG

   for Nora Nadjarian

    

    

   Dear Nora, we first met glad and unthreatened. That was before the war.

   The book was open, the poem beckoned, but that was before the war.

    

   My hair was probably straight, you told me, back when mascara mattered

   and we were poised to write into every second. Such plans before the war!

    

   Dear Nora, then death visited your father. But I must not say that. 

   The above letter was shredded; maybe that was before the war?

    

   Today I saw the photograph of a dead man dumped naked in a well.

   Grief still there, still there, you mentioned: of course, even before the war.

    

   Dear Nora, remember when we talked about the moon and death?

   I love to be alive! I offered. Life was strangely pleasant just before the war.

    

   Writing for posterity: what a joke, you wrote. The poem held its tongue,

   half-formed, half-present, muted by horror, not like it was before the war. 

    

   Grief is on its long, slow journey: an old man walks down a burning street 

   under the moon's dull crescent calling a child's name as if before the war.

    

   Now truth drags out its death drawl: 'To which current war do you refer?' 

   We live in the dark of that question: no such era as 'before the war'.

    

   Dear Nora, help me. The poem asks the poet: 'What rhymes with sorrow?'.

   I'm too far gone to answer. I thought I knew. That was before the war.

10. / Velvel's Violin

    

    

    ENGENG

    'I know they're proud of me that I remember and that I tell the world what happened'

    Rachel Shtibel, Holocaust survivor

     

    All the years of the war, Velvel's violin lay silent 

    under the walnut tree where he'd buried it.

     

    Like Rachel and Luci, their childhoods gagged

    in barns and bunkers, all it wanted was to play.

     

    Their zayde witnessed, from behind the fence

    at the cemetery, his wife buried alive by the Gestapo.

     

    The graves are moving, the graves are moving!

    he told the ghetto, and lost the will to live.

     

    When Rachel and Luci crawled out of the hole 

    they'd shared for two years, they had lost their voices.

     

    After the war, the remnants of family disinterred 

    Velvel's violin from underneath the walnut tree.

     

    It is all we have left of Velvel said their father, 

    but of course nobody knew how to play it.

11. / vintage führer

    

    

    ENGENG

    you can bid 

    for his face

    on ebay

    emblazoned

    on an ashtray

12. / Diaspora

    

    

    ENGENG

    I lost both my lovely uncles 

    one after the other

    to another country.

     

    Jubilantly they had passed 

    their examinations 

    and once equipped with

     

    white coats and certificates 

    they poised to join

    the gloried institutions

     

    only to find corridors that reeked 

    of church and pork

    of estrangement and handshakes 

     

    panelled rooms where their name 

    stuck to the roof 

    of the English mouth.

     

    I lost both my lovely uncles 

    one after the other

    to another country.

     

    Just when we thought 

    we had arrived home

    our shrunken family once more 

     

    found itself huddled over 

    indecipherable letters 

    despatched from distant possibilities.

     

    I lost both my lovely uncles 

    one after the other

    to another country.

     

    On high holy days I spread 

    my grandmother's cloth

    I lay out my mother's silver

     

    and I miss my lovely uncles: 

    their blessings

    and dreadful singing

     

    their Jewish faces 

    blinking and flickering

    in the candlelight

13. / Mazel

    

    

    ENGENG

    for Robin

     

     

    We seize it like ice-cream in summer, like

    love when you're lonely, like kiss-me-again,

    like sex, like time, like home, like taking 

    the corners of this wide life over and over

    while we still can. The blinds rise to mazel

    as they let in the light, the summer shines it

    in sky-shades of forget-me-not, a son brews it

    in the blessing of morning coffee; a daughter 

    carries mazel home, baked into hot bread 

    from the floury queue at The Dusty Knuckle; 

    a woman at the beach car park offers mazel

    winding down the window of her Ford Fiesta 

    with the gift of a free dashboard ticket 

    to a beautiful day going nowhere; and on 

    towel-striped sands, a stranger tosses cones 

    of mazel from a box of melting Cornettos

    because no way can I eat them all myself; 

    and talking of self and melt, a person can be 

    mazel too, like you are now, chancing in 

    with your smile on show as I write this poem; 

    the way your cheeks round like small pink plums 

    your head tilts a little to the left like always

    your eyes say mensch, mensch, sand and years, 

    kiss-me-again, forget-me-never and mazel, mazel,

    mazel tov, another day rounding another corner.