Two Poems by Gill Barr

Tessellations

A chilly gust of wind blows through your ribs and is decomposing you.
You no longer have an ear. Your neck has vanished*

You talk about a virtual event giving an Italian poet
a platform to reach an audience beyond her own language.
You recall her poesie scelte, its rhythms.
I want to tell you – but your mind is rather full
as you serve out spaghetti arrabbiata and talk
about emotion in a language you don’t understand.
I am trying to stay with you but cannot help thinking
of my online search for Frampton where we walked
on Sunday past the shrunken
village down the sloping field to an absence
on a flint platform under the growing,
where I spread my arms and tried to conjure a villa
or a Roman temple through which the ritual
of water might have run.

You are talking about the importance of translation
but I want to tell you that I have found illustrations
of the lost mosaics from the building we could not see;
that one pavement contained a poem inscribed in Latin
in catalectic anapaestic dimeters that no one can translate
for sure, nor is it certain what all the figures mean:
are Bacchus, Neptune, Cupid with dolphins
linked to the chi rho in the apse or the mythic lovers
in the corners or the damaged hunters on their horses?
The makers of the mosaics are unknown, as are those
who laid them, those who lost them, found them,
drew or defaced them, then buried what was left.
We keep setting down in words and other ways
our myths, our acts of love – we keep repeating.

*Un soffio di freddo ti attraversa le costole e tis ta scomponendo.
Non hai piu un orecchio. Il tuo collo e svanito.

From: Before words become hot wax: selected poems
by Franca Mancinelli. Translated by John Taylor – Ledbury (2020)

Talking To Each Other

You reach up in the early dawn
to open the window above our bed.
Your bowed belly is warm to my drawn hand,
the night’s heat still in you: I imagine journeys,
conjure the sultana and her lover
attuned to birdsong under a cypress tree
in a garden teeming with jasmine, lilies, rose,
profuse with pomegranates, figs, plump strawberries
picked from plants that sent out runners, set down roots,
grew out of the wild woods into gardens,
escaped again, climbed into masons’ minds,
crept along the margins of manuscripts,
onto the corners of handkerchiefs, when you say,
Listen, the doves are talking to each other.

Gill Barr’s poems have appeared in a wide range of publications such as The Honest Ulsterman, erbacce press, Harvest, The New European, and Riptide’s Climate Change Matters Anthology. In 2019 and 2021 she appeared at the Exeter Literary Festival with Greta Stoddart, Elaine Beckett, and Helen Evans. In 2018 she shared the stage with Annie Freud at the Bridport Literary Festival and in 2017 she read her prize-winning short story called Skylight at the same festival. Her monologue Free Thinking, about same sex marriage, was performed in Exeter as part of Gripping Yarns in 2014. Gill holds an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast and is a hugely experienced teacher of English. She lives between Dorset and Northern Ireland, where she was born.