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Martyn Crucefix |
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Martyn Crucefix�s most recent collection is An English Nazareth (Enitharmon, 2004). His new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke�s Duino Elegies (Enitharmon 2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation.
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While There Is War
after Table and Chair by Peter Coker
This must be the filthy sink.
A beige-brown door leads
off to a brown-beige place.
Here a dirt-grey floor promises
at first glance only dull support.
A table and chair of wood:
something like deal and words
such as scrubbed and plain
will prove quite good enough.
Yet the boy is a bright one.
You have to look in his eye.
At the table's grain-marked end,
muscular, whole cooking-apples,
a soup bowl, a glass bottle
shows blinding white of milk.
A fork lies at the ready
yet there is nothing to spear.
A colander set to do service.
Those few shell-like objects
scattered under the boy's gaze
might be oysters. Or perhaps nuts.
A word like beechmast
would report them well enough.
And the splash of red that seizes
the eye of the on-looker,
can only be considered last.
It's a flayed death's head.
Laid out on old newspapers,
it looks like ketchup and chips.
It is the head of a sheep.
These items take the table-top.
But the boy does not climb to it
does not clamber down and away.
Despite everything, the boy
seems prepared to stand there
counting.
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© 2008 The Cortland Review |
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