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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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