Two Poems by JLM Morton

Leaning into the trouble

Would you believe
me if I told you

that I walked out
one night

to the Common
and my hands began

to bleed – not blood,
but dye – and the moon

rose on the Scots pine singing
broken hearted in Van Diemen’s Land.

With each cold step
there was a tearing as if

time were being torn
like cloth from a frame

and the sea came crashing
over, warm waves

of bioluminescence
carrying iron chains

and the yoke’s
dull clunk. I fell

to my knees, scraped
the soil, turned up gold

with my fingers and the moon
cried an ocean for lutruwita,

for the riches and the thieving,
and my pilfering hands kept

streaming red and I don’t
think they put this

in the history books.

‘broken hearted / in Van Diemen’s land’ are lines from a ballad (anon) about poachers deported to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). lutruwita is the indigenous Nuenonne / Palawa kani name for Tasmania. 

Curse Tablets

Takedowns from the British Celt (an imagined translation)

Everyone who ever loved you
was wrong.

May your mind be
an utter bungalow.

May you go the many miles
you need to reach
unexceptional.

You are
the human equivalent
of a participation award.

May your day be
as scintillating
as your personality.

I envy everyone
you have
never met.

May you
develop
an obsessive compulsion for clean hands.

You are a
breathing
pork pie.

JLM Morton is from Gloucestershire. Winner of the Laurie Lee and Geoffrey Dearmer Prizes, her first collection of poems, Red Handed, is forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books in May 2024.