Christopher Meredith:
New Poems



The Meaning of Flight

The Message

no secrets which appeared to require concealment were revealed.
Anthony Storr, Solitude


She hid her notebooks underneath a board.
All her secret years were what she'd written
And the message � oh the message was in code.

The Lonely Child, Creative, Bright, Ignored
Kept diaries according to the pattern
And hid her notebooks underneath a board.

Years later, experts come upon the hoard
- Keys to the great writer's motivation
But the message, ah, the message is in code.

They clap their hands. So much to be explored
Deciphering the secret heart of a woman
Who hid her notebooks underneath a board.

And that unlocking lets light on what's stored -
Eventless commonplaces. An empty room. The burden
Is no message is the message in the code.

She knows the cipher's greater than the word.
What's on display's the fact that all is hidden
So she hides her notebooks underneath a board
And the message is the message is in code.





Aubade in middle age


The inchlong vapour trail dissolves
fast as the blind invisible head of jet
scores sky
- a dead slow meteor or a speeded comet
gives in its vanishing tail a sliver of the sun
that hasn't risen yet
on your icestiff patch of earth.

Anaemic rim of fading moon
lets go at last
and vanishes.
Steel venus rising
falls back to the colour of the sky.
That colour that you couldn't name
resolves to taut thrush egg.
Rags of cloud come hard as gunmetal.

And you resume yourself
with the ache of gravity
and the strangeness of a leaving dream.
Whatever it was
has dropped you here
and gone.

Day after day sense and daylight crowd the window
to haul you back and then resculpt the world
with muscular volume, shade and weight,
to whisper again the old advice:
Come on. Wake up. Time to try again.
Time to seal the meat,
to set the day's pot cooking.






These poems appear in Chris's latest collection The Meaning of Flight, 2005, published by Seren, 57 Nolton Street, Bridgend CF31 3BN, Wales, tel 01656 663018, or email.



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