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Macrofossil & Other Poems

Leilanie Stewart

       MACROFOSSIL

Quercus
What can you tell me of ziggurats?
Oh, how you’ll never see
It’s so one-sided

Tephra
What would you know of cuneiform?
The varves are too young…
Much too young

Coleoptera
They’re coming and they’re sensitive
They’ll lay the rest to bed
In your fields. Your ponds. Your cities.

       ANATOMICALLY MODERN

It comes of its own free mind
and it’s fully formed-
I can’t stop it

It might have been brewing for centuries
a mya perhaps,
So who am I to argue with that?

If you change the order of even one part:
Adenine/guanine/ cytosine/ thiamine/ urasil
It’s all over for good.

        WANING LYRICAL

These are the lyrics
to the song of all I’ve got
left in me
I’ve been squeezed like a lemon
you wouldn’t believe I even had a flavour
but I assure you I do
and it’ll be back tomorrow

       CAUSALITY OF A HOPELESS DREAMER

I touched it – it floated
on an eddy of gold dust

I cracked a rib
as it flittered away

I followed
it led me astray down a path

where possums played
in Mulberry trees

I pushed on into candyfloss clouds
it ascended into a fissure of light

I watched through the V in my fingers
I closed my eyes and reached

       A BIG FAT WASTE OF TIME

I don’t know whether
I’m coming
or going
or have already been
and returned
and am wearing
the T-shirt to prove it
or whether
I’d never been here
in the first place
or simply,
had come,
then vanished – just gone

It’s all irrelevant anyway
when I’m sitting here
talking to no one
in particular

Leilanie Stewart’s poems have been published in dozens of print and online literary magazines in the UK and US. Recently her work appeared in the Best of 2013 Storm Cycle Anthology published by Kind of a Hurricane Press in May this year. Her debut poetry pamphlet, A Model Archaeologist, is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing’s 20/20 pamphlet series in February 2015. She currently lives in London with her poet and writer husband, Joseph Robert. Her writing blog is at www.leilaniestewart.wordpress.com
February 17, 2015 12:40 pm

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