A Tonalist Poetry Feature

Geraldine Monk

Decade Dance

Two Thousand and Ten again.
I suppose it’s time we apologised to Mr and
Mrs Neanderthal for
dashing out their yam noodles against
their last cave of
pots and lip gloss —
I never for a minute thought
they were
Millwall fans.

Old moon.
Wolf moon.
Moon after Yule.
Ice Moon.
Gone January missing moon.

To wake so early on the
new year
with wings
blotting shimmer with
massive move of dream
retreat through
slits of eyelids —
what on earth?
Hey Archaeopteryx!
Urvogel!
What on earth are you doing here in
my inner city?

The owl disappeared itself hours ago
down the warped gullet of a
dreary decade or maybe
Minerva stole it away making space for the
first bird
and its lost flock.

The supernatural is full on and fierce.

When a breeze came
the leaves lapped up the
silence like the
tongues of little
creatures drinking
wrote Mary Webb

Like little tongues tuthree
snowflakes
lap the cheek of my first barefaced
sentence of the decade
and the first death came as soon
as the flakes melted

funerals flood us with ourselves —
our memory is now all of you.
In my best mute face I tried to read the
secret recipe for hedgehog pasties now
buried for ever under a glorious

sky

there
was a falling of cloud
in between and apart
stretch of neck bone and ligaments
longing the
throat to wail an
aria as good as a
wolf but
twice as
foxy

all in a moonless month
full of fabulous birds and their absence

Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s and has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Britain and the U.S.A. Her main collections of poetry include Interregnum, Creation Books, Noctivagations and Escafeld Hangings both published by West House Books. The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk edited by Scott Thurston appeared in 2007. Her latest collection is Ghost & Other Sonnets, Salt Publishing, 2008.