West Bank Poetry

There are some poets who like the magpie
collect words that glitter and shine in the sunlight
the unusual, the archaic and the exotic
and like the magpie they toy with their object
turning it over, stretching it, pulling it,
for example, taken purely at random,
the word, skirr, meaning to scour, search
or to skim, a word familiar to the Ancient
Scot, but one that is of little use in Brooklyn,
And like the foreigners selling accessories
from their stalls, the poets indulge
their readers' lack of expertise and knowledge
by placing Latin, Hebrew,Russian
alongside the commonplace,
so what is trivial and somewhat humdrum
sounds very special even sacred like Byzantine
liturgies.

Of course it is not always incense and High Church,
there are some who prefer the vulgate,
the colloquial, the slang, and "buggeries"
would serve well here, as the verbal sin,
giving the poem that James Kelman meets
Ronald Firbank touch, one acceptable
to those who still say grace at the table
and in the bogs will quietly masturbate,
I am however less orthodox in my approach,
as I tend to unpack the words, and try to explain
what is meant, like an expert in a malpractice
case, cf The Verdict, I open up the words,
perhaps enviscerate them, see what I mean,
but there are those who would like mysteries,
and live dangerously without dictionaries,
and have the word left undefined like the bread
and wine through transubstantiation,
taste something beyond our ken, something
other than the topics of our daily conversation,
"so skirr", "so skirr", "so skirr"
and the magpie flies to its nest with gum
wrappers, a one hundred yen necklace,
the buckle of a plastic belt, and the ending
of this poem.

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The crow walks along there as if tilling the field.- Issa