Graeme Hetherington: Three Poems

Exorcism

As I played cricket with a golf

Ball in our yard, driving it hard,

A kitten strayed into its path,

And screeching, frantically intent,

Squeezed between weatherboard and ground,

A gap too narrow for my hand.

It must have died at once, since I

Heard nothing more until today,

Sixty years on, its miaow in

My head drove me to write this poem.

Graeme Hetherington

Upper Heights and Lower Depths

What heights remain beyond our reach

When dog whistle and tuning fork,

Straining to listen though we may,

Sound notes pitched too high for our ear,

Deserting us yearning to rise,

Freed from the confines of our lives?

Nor can we hear how far below

The scales a crow’s cawing might go,

Summoning to a fathomless

Black abyss, as Aeschylus in

His tragedies, at first much too

Profound to be understood with

Such measurelessly dark deep lines

As “cry sorrow, yet let the good

Prevail, man suffers to grow wise”,

Sang the ever-feuding Greeks down

Into the bottomless pit…