The New Writer

In 2011, my submission was highly commended in The New Writer's Collection Competition. This Autumn they published the following 3 poems from that submission. They are all poems set in Crete, and I love the way they set them out all on one page - thank-you The New Writer, I feel honoured!
www.thenewwriter.com

Borders

                                   It was easy to find

the herb garden. A boy, dark-skinned, 

puts down his hoe to show us round 

beds of rose bergamot, cinnamon trees,

five varieties of sage, a bank of blue hyssop. 

He picks us leaves that taste of chocolate, 

sprigs of things to sniff - savouries, thymes and mints -

pointing out subtle differences

like someone born to it. 

‘Did you grow up here?’

No, he’s from a place in Northern Pakistan,

famous for cricket. He’s walked here, 

he says. Had to. Eldest son. 

No, not Afghanistan, he almost laughed,

too dangerous. Through Iran.

Arrived in Thessalonika. No work.

Athens. No work. Terrible, he says.

A friend brought him here.

 ‘So you’re safe here?’

I see him hoeing, watering, harvesting

the healing herbs. ‘It's paradise in Crete?’ 

He shrugs, looks at the soil on his feet.

‘I live over there,’ waving vaguely 

at mauve mountains.

‘I cannot live in village. Police. 

No papers. Papers only by marry.’ 

I pinch out a smile.

Tagetes are piled on the drying nets,

bloody as sunsets, behind him. 

The thyme is on fire, seething

with bees.

Easter Monday

Morning air still

has the chill of spring 

in its veins

but we wake bleary

from too much blood of God

in ours  

still heavy

with Easter’s

spit-roast sacrifices.

We drink the blood of two oranges,

breathe basil

and singed cypress wood.

Spun light pulses

wireless

between geranium and lavender.

Paired doves 

make love with same three notes 

an interval apart.

The single yellow iris 

cuts its quivering chiaroscuro

out of carob shade

waiting

for the baritone drone

of the bee

to sense an entrance, 

lever the velvet sepal, 

bumble in, 

and leave,

perfunctory

in its purpose.

Peaches

September. School is back. 

I'm on the beach, biting the flesh

of a soft, sun-ripened peach.

A cicada tuts from a tamarisk tree.

I think of my grandma, who once, 

on a Greenline bus in Hertfordshire, 

after the war, when I was four,

announced her disapproval of peaches.

'All skin and stone. 

Nowt between worth the money.'

Hanna, sumptious as a peach, 

sprawls sultana golden on a beachbed

borrowed from an old man 

toothless and walnut skinned,

who watches her all day 

from under his tamarisk tree. 

Hannah doesn’t mind. Whatever 

turns him on. She has a bed: 

he, food for fantasy.

Both have their peaches, free.