Ron Pretty: Three Poems

Siren
for Wendy Richardson

 

Wendy remembers the miners of the village,

how they sat on their front verandas drinking the sun,

hawking gobbets of dark phlegm onto hydrangeas

or geraniums, those hardy survivors. They were silent men

with silent wives, who listened day after day for the siren

& waited year after year for black lung or emphysema.

Wendy saw them stooped & aching around the village,

retired from the pit, struggling for breath.

 

Once I went down into a mine with Len,

who’d worked there boy & man. I saw how

the miners bent in the low galleries while

I shivered under the creaking roof timbers, a string

of feeble lights in the gritty air. Waves of silence

broken by skips coming and going. I watched

a darkness climb onto a metal seat, fiddle with controls

& then the roar of the shark-toothed extractor.

 

In my tidy office we often joked of “working

at the coal face,” but here, when that huge machine

began clawing at the gates of hell, I knew what fear was

& why the miners on their front verandas,

though they dozed with dark eyes closed

in sunlight, were listening, always listening

for the siren compelling their next descent

—or another body crushed beneath the roof.

Ron Pretty

 

 

Pigeons of the Dome

From here on the balcony we see them: pigeons

in Hagia Sophia. They roost high in the dome,

their view is ages old of pilgrims and tourists

crowding the marble floors of this cathedral, mosque,

and now museum.

Always they have flown here,

in this still air once hallowed and now profane.

They look down today on these flashlight tourists

as they did on desecrating crusaders whose pirate king

lies buried here, he whose holy marauding

brought him down at last;

and then Mohammedans,

sons of the Prophet, spreading the word by the sword.

 

The pigeons have seen it all. They nest in the dome

as they have from its first raising up, their feathered kind

has prospered two thousand years while kingdoms

have come and gone.

They glide in the still air,

while far below, a child looks up from between

her parent and cries for birds trapped, it seems,

as they drift from icon to icon in artificial light

under the arching heavens.

Her father, learnéd, devout,

but ignorant of the pigeons’ history, murmurs to her,

Aren’t we all. Who knows if the arc of heaven will hold?

When the temple falls at last, these birds will surely escape

the cupola, will fly free under the blue dome of the sky.

Ron Pretty

 

 

 

 

Wallabies, Hill End

I

A black faced wallaby

eating herbs

outside the kitchen window.

Who could deny

such beauty its due?

 

Velvet ears

actively alert. Such furred

music, minuet or largo

rocking slowly

on see-saw legs

easing from patch to patch.

 

II

The wallaby & her joey

at home

in our back yard,

quietly grazing this

friendly acre or so.

 

To open the door

when they’re at home

brings instant alarm

to so disturb them

in their own domain.

 

The mother draws

to her full height

& watches with suspicion

as this interloper

takes a step outside.

 

Another step

& she’s gone

with the joey in her pouch,

a bouncy retreat

wonderful to watch.

 

III

Next morning

she’ll be back

to continue her meal.

This time

I’ll be careful

not to disturb her.

Ron Pretty