Two Poems by Christopher Ware

On hearing a cassette recording of the last kaua’i ō’ō

I caught his call the other day,
Embattled, worn from wading through
Those vital sounds of study rooms at play,
His who-who-who
Dispensing charm in triplicate
And yet, unmet by anything
Resembling the repartee
One hopes to get when searching for a paramour.

I'm sure he couldn't know
How circumstance would leave
His work unanswered,
Those neat motifs of hard wired lust
As dulcet as a rusted brake,
Now pinned against a spindle clutch
Restored perhaps, for pity's sake,
Unspooling from a body stuffed
With ferric oxide feed, indeed
Belonging back to times before,
Completely out of sync
With modern love.

eija riiter is in love with the berlin wall

and cried 
when they tore strips 
from his skin

She felt the concrete
thicken in her blood
and couldn't bear to see
the sonnets he had scribbled
just for her
be shared like tourniquets 
across the loveless
halves of that city

Christopher Ware is a poet from South London, where he currently works as a teacher. He has had a smattering of his work published in magazines and anthologies, most recently in The Adriatic and the latest Vita Brevis collection.