Water found on distant planet.
I want to go there.
Free of embarrassment, none that I know there.
Eye can cross if it wants to, head can tilt right,
breath fogged in the space suit in the eternal night,
and thirty five light years from mission control
body shaped like an apple, the sky black as coal,
and the numbers the same for me and for you.
Any hand, any pipette, primordial stew,
any eye in appraisal of alien hue,
any handwriting, racked in the cold centrifuge.
In thirty five years, bit by bitstream, the cell
brings its greetings from that far-flung gravity well.
Water found on distant planet.
Nobody knows me.
Just a fluke freak of nature that somebody chose me.
You land on the moon and come back, celebrate,
and I am the stray dog you scruff and sedate
waking up, bones a-shake, aluminium crate
and sent off far away, a forgotten mistake.
Why they send the afraid one, the trembling one off
to pollute alien water with sterilised piss,
in a module suspiciously sealed up for this
to send pictures of cells back in digital bits
was answered in school records wrote long ago
of a heart pound to burst in the very back row
mother stab, teacher stab, and the knife on the shelf
and their cold little smiles when I do it myself.
Water found on distant planet.
Maybe God put it there,
the God of the universe, maybe some others
whose angels take me to where all men are brothers.
We write of ambrosia and nectar, the plates
and the seraphim, joy in each heavenly face
and the cells, eerie green and unearthly of shape
as they lift to their mouths for the tiniest taste -
that’s, to me, what it is to abide in God's grace.
Flowers
I like tiny little flowers,
not the great rich sprays in the breeze
but the shy ones, tucked into corners of trees
and the stone walls of rooms where we shag for hours.
Not marigolds. Roses, forgot and blown
and purple pink, more smell than round perfect buds
and the funk of seaweed and crabs and mud
on the beach where we find ourselves whole and alone.
I like flowers they call weeds,
catching paper in cracks between pavements and houses,
the silent beliefs held by long married spouses,
the passion and hope, wonder, terrible deeds
brought to critical mass by potential and power
and the small, forgotten flowers.
In The Fens
Many are the things and scars and baubles
I have gathered, caught leaves in the whipping winds,
remembering quickened seeds, water, begin
and sing melodies, ancient songs, heartbreak and troubles,
born in storms, roots and stems torn off where they sprouted,
unnatural squares, building ceilings and walls
and the holes punched straight through in the midnight squalls
when the baby woke up from a bad dream, and shouted
cross the no man's land of barbed wire and mines
where the beetles touch down and eat all the corpses
and the thunderstorms roll in on ten thousand horses
and chieftains call marches, all splendid and fine
and the river crashes, making spray with the wind
as the skeletons shake off their moss in the fens.
Greta Thunberg
God save us from the hazards of the day
fly up each step as rakes and break our noses, waves that tremble fifty feet away
await commands of every absent Moses
that mumbled in a mouth restrained by scars
burned hard, pronouncing Tetragrammaton
inhaled exhaust of thirty million cars
between the sleeping mountains rumbling on
toward cold, deep seas. Courageous prophet sails -
no engine. Singing with the wind and ropes
a warning, cried by birds and droning whales
with bellies full to bursting with our hopes,
shrivelled balloons we’d held and launched away:
God save us from the hazards of the day.
Margaret Corvid is a writer, and activist based in the South West of the UK. She is a contributing editor of Salvage. She is a New Statesman blogger, and her writing has also appeared in the Guardian, and Cosmopolitan. She writes on sex work, sexuality, gender, and many other labour issues. Social media splash image by Marissa Angel.