Three Poems by John McCullough

The Stones on Brighton Beach

have forgotten their names. Why bother to remember
when every hour a little more of each face disappears?

Hurled about, rearranged, they know only clattering songs
of surrender, the thunk of defeat. They will not question

the sea though its rough tongue licks away history.
They grind against each other, ensure none gets ideas.

The stone flying into air plummets straight back down.
They deny outright their former lives in cliffs.

Wicked eyes torn out of the moon – that’s the sort of story
they prefer. They all fell from the sky. My feet stamp

across them, countless versions of my face I kick away,
send skittering to smooth, rancorous futures.

Psalm

And then there are singing sands,
their low hum heard for miles.
Each shifting layer of grains slides over
those beneath, all pogoing up and down
in unison when triggered by the wind
or walking, someone’s speech.

Batfish warble when the sun climbs,
a soft ba-ba-ba. Comets have tongues
as well as tails, sudden oscillations
in magnetic fields, and some days
a maple becomes a somber angel,
its percussive voice clear and true.

Fall with the fall of notes
and in your nerve cells,
ions will softly buzz. The minutes trill.
The one psalm ribbons through silence,
a hunger that never sleeps
and will not be ignored.

When a choir of humans sings, our hearts
pound in sync, throats open.
We build soaring architecture.
No one is irrelevant in the unfolding wave.
Keep singing when the stars hide,
whirlwinds gather. Let sound improve us.

The West Pier Pays a Visit

I wake to a long scraping sound – iron dragged
over concrete. It slices down the seam of me,
a giant pair of rusty scissors. It’s the ruined pier again,

a black skeleton that’s wrenched bony columns
from the ocean floor. It lurches and sways.
Only a few stiff legs walk properly, its back-half

a lugged carcass. Sparks scatter across paving
as it crunches onward fifty miles from the sea,
every step a collapse, bits falling off, clattering.

This is Watford, I say but it doesn’t care,
shambling to my front garden as if it were natural
for it to roam, as if its guano-splashed lattice

so far beyond repair has found a hobby.
I visited Brighton and now it’s come out to me
and my tiny terrace house – I, who can’t tell anyone

what creature I am, who hold my breath on the estate
when I shuffle past men with pit bulls, sneers.
Close up, spiders dangle from girders like earrings.

Barnacles stare. The structure tilts and falls over me.
I stand, enclosed. A salt wind rushes through.
Leave now. Fracture and revive.

John McCullough’s third book of poems, Reckless Paper Birds, was published with Penned in the Margins and won the 2020 Hawthornden Prize for Literature, as well as being shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award. His fourth collection, Panic Response, was published in March by Penned in the Margins and was named one of the The Sunday Times Notable New Poetry Books of 2022.