Myra Schneider: Five Poems

Cushion Moss

The sad paragraphs in the paper offer

no answers but they fade a little once I’m outside

although there’s rain in the air and the sudden sun

silvering naked twigs as I enter the park

doesn’t last. I’m in the copse where rooks

are flapping in quarrel as usual, when it stops me

in my tracks: moss cushioning a fallen tree.

The green fabric is so vibrant it’s almost luminous.

It awakens grey branches and untidy brambles

emerging from clots of darkness. Hard to believe

this green is natural but no manmade process

could possibly create such soft brilliance.

It’s not water meadow green, not nettle green,

lime green, olive, not glossy laurel,

not intense Lorca green. It’s a green spawned

by the damp bedded in rotting logs and deep

leaf mush, a green that’s been so mothered

by light it banishes lightlessness, a green

more potent than the science which explains it,

a green which fills my mind, feeds my arteries,

a green that urges: never give up.

Myra Schneider

 

Homeless

Months ago but I can’t shift him

from my mind. A slip of a boy, not more

than sixteen, he’s sitting on the pavement in Curzon Street,

world of the wealthy, propped against a lamppost outside an upmarket

Tesco Express, his only possessions a sleeping bag and an empty paper cup.

 

I don’t suppose he’s noticed

the mansion up the road, home of the aristocracy

for centuries, now a Middle Eastern embassy. Railings obscure

its lawns and guards armed with rifles are on duty by the electronic gates

which bear the emblem of a sturdy palm tree set between a pair of crossed swords.

 

He seems as yet untouched

by sleeping rough. Nearby, weighty volumes

bound in leather and silver cutlery, bedded in a canteen’s

snug felt, beckon from glinting windows and even the Caffè Nero looks

posh. He’s as out of place as those daunting gates would be in a housing estate.

 

The autumnal afternoon is colourless

but there’s a sense of crimson and ochre leaves

paling and falling, of winter in the wings. In the cinema

we watch a film about a widower with a heart condition who’s made

homeless because he can’t, won’t jump through bureaucracy’s technological hoops.

 

When we come out diners are feasting

in restaurants where a popular market was once held.

The lad is still in the same spot. I buy him a chicken sandwich

in Tesco’s. Surprised, his face breaks into a smile and he grasps my hand.

I smile too but I’m pierced by shame sharp as the spikes on the embassy’s railings.

Myra Schneider

 

Looking at Light

You love it for pouncing with obvious delight

on this bottle of water, implanting flecks

like a series of intense kisses on the neck,

 

seizing on the flowers speckling the mat

underneath and multiplying them in the bottle’s

transparent interior. Another feat:

 

it’s blued the frostbitten park but the sun

will emerge, lay pinkish streamers

on the stiff grass and paleness will disappear

 

as it douses the air with a sense of gold.

All your rooms will awaken and you’ll long

to keep lucidity but nothing will stop

 

crimsons and violets from spilling over the sky

to herald darkness. But when the day dies

you’ll gaze at dazzle-needles which the bottles

 

on the bathroom window ledge have snatched

from the streetlights, at the electric red

splashed on the panes by a passing car

 

and for moments illumination will fill you.

Later, you’ll wake to a chill nothingness

but you’ll find a lemon pool of moon

 

on the landing carpet, wish you could kneel

and gather it up in your arms, wish

its silent certainty could wipe out grief.

Myra Schneider

 

Returning

Once again May has grabbed me by the scruff,

again I’ve sloughed off the winter sleep

of forgetting, am stunned by new green dotting

trees, how it unfolds in leaps and bounds

on verges, in rail sidings, depot yards

and every handkerchief of waste ground.

It’s as if I’ve never looked at the freckles

of milky florets cramming hawthorn twigs,

the clots of elderflowers. And although once

I was wild as fieldside brambles it’s as if

I’ve never fingered newly risen grasses:

feather-headed fescue, the whiskers of barley

or the brush heads of timothy, have just learnt

that warmth makes a bed in untamed grass

which covets clover and white parsley umbrellas.

I breathe in the sweet extravagance,

dream I’ll come back as grass or blossom

until a voice in my head mocks with lists

of droughts, names of extinct species. I think

of vanished sparrows and how often the stream

in the park is dry-lipped, the earth pocked

with cracks. And it yawns before me: the possibility

of fescue, flowers, leaves not returning.

Myra Schneider

 

 

The Moment

Shoving our bodies against the wind,

we start a slow marathon round

the bay to the Turner Gallery, a hulk

 

looming in the distance, pass dead

ice-cream parlours and a couple of dippy

gift shops. Clouds are speeding

 

across the sky’s immensity, waves

are cascading onto the esplanade and rushing

the wild waters of my childhood upon me.

 

We’re halfway when the sun pushes

through the busy traffic overhead.

In seconds the world transforms. I gape

 

at luminous greens awakening in swirls

of gunmetal sea, at yellowgolds glinting

on white crests and suddenly I know

 

why he painted this expanse so often.

The revelation is like moonlight flooding

darkness and just for a moment I am Turner.

Myra Schneider