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11th April, 2025

Friday Poem – Opening of ‘I.M’ by Deryn Rees-Jones

Photo of a steaming cup of tea in a glass mug in the sunlight

This week’s Friday Poem is parts 1 & 2 of the long poem ‘I.M.’ by Deryn Rees-Jones from her collection Erato.

I.M.
*
Sometimes at Easter we’d drive west, stopping, makeshift, at our curious stations: once to put a bet on a horse –
once, slowed behind a whole village, a man dragging a man-sized cross. Now Easter
is come round again and I stand once more by a restless lough.Your body’s ashes drift: Carra, Corrib, the shores of Carrowmore. A landscape has become a conversation; mountains, godlike, touch my godlessness, Croagh Patrick stained by pilgrims’ feet. Darling, what did I leave when we left you where sky and water meet?
*
An old love is a kind of promise.
In the first rush of new unholy orders
there’s a wish to make a body limitless.
Now here’s a longing for my breast
to meet a mouth, for you again to slip your hands inside my heart and with a turn of limbs
to bring a rhyme of colour to my cheek.
Owl hoot, fox call.A phone rings
in a distant house. How to be one
in this strange equation? We drive together
in the dark. I mark a simple prosody
in making tea. Later, in each other’s ghostly arms, the radio will sing us both asleep.