Two Poems by Clarissa Aykroyd

Brilliant cut

Fish-scale light,
chainmail gold water.
Estonia edges out
into the gulf,
a final throw of rocks.

Isayev and his friend
have waded out. Waves carry sound
but they’re so far now.

They want to be fishers of men.
They have the tools. Their minds flicker
with codes, passports,
cursed papers, door-opening letters.
But diamonds fall through their fingers.
Diamonds fall from the sky,
breaking into colours that
break the light. They leave a mark
on the men who walk into the water
with faces cut like facets.

Yustas

The radio calculates the stones.
It tells him: count every one.
Flights of numbers fall through the air.
And meanwhile
his mind walks into the pines.

Taiga. Listening. His hand
on the birch’s white skin.

The radio stutters. A breath.
Then the voices
naming this sky and
that other sky with its cipher of birds.

Clarissa Aykroyd is from Victoria, Canada and now lives in London. Her poems and translations have been published internationally. Her debut pamphlet Island of Towers was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2019, and her blog The Stone and the Star (on poetry and poets) can be found at www.thestoneandthestar.blogspot.co.uk.