Poetry

Eduard Militaru photo

By

Leslie Philibert

Son

The neighbor’s boy too damaged to have a name.

So just called Son.

Big as a tree with

lots of birds in the branches.

Full of smiles and unintended spit.

When he died they said.

It is a release, now he is free.

He was full of the smiles of incomprehension,

The rocking gait of a lost pony.

He often looked at the sky, the birds

heading for Gatwick.

Coal Bunker

Spin webbed and cracked,

It sits drunkenly, waiting for its next black meal.

Solid as a Bauhaus, squat as a fat Buddha.

It is guarded by ancient rose trees, too strong to be pruned.

Too deep to be dug out, too heartless to kill.

This could be the entrance to a cave of pressure

and old steam, the inside of a lost ocean, or

waves of stone now broken and dispersed.

But it is more what it is.

Roof

Our house is a city trawler,

suffering dark rain

changed with brick dust and smoke.

Our house drinks like an old man

tilting an old saucer

into a grainy mouth.

This sky gives you a sense of false cleaning.

We admire the falling sea in heavy parts.

Most of this water seeks

the dark and drains of

bricked channels

as if our street denies all this flow of solution.

Mother

She hated the thoughts of days of washing

And bad things happening to the cats

Winter months when color stepped out the garden,

Fractured pavements on Anerley Hill tripped her

during the hunt for a lost bargain, the shopping.

All the fear inside is not to be diluted

All the sacrifice not recognized as wasted.

There is now a space where she nervously

hopped like a sparrow in the morning.

The clink of teacups in saucers, of spoons.

Pleased you never knew how three fell into holes

Pleased you never knew how your second life by proxy

got lost on the way to the pub.

Leslie Philibert

Leslie Philibert comes from London, England. After studying English Literature in Ireland he moved to Bavaria in Germany, where he now works as a social worker. He is married with two children. He has had poems published in a number of magazines in the UK and USA. He has also done some translation work for a South German theatre group.