Paula Meehan
I chose your grave clothes with care,
your favourite stripey shirt,

your blue cotton trousers.
They smelt of woodsmoke, of October,

your own smell there too.
I chose a gansy of handspun wool,

warm and fleecy for you. It is
so cold down in the dark.

No light can reach you and teach you
the paths of wild birds,

the names of the flowers,
the fishes, the creatures.

Ignorant you must remain
of the sun and its work,

my lamb, my calf, my eaglet,
my cub, my kid, my nestling,

my suckling, my colt. I would spin
time back, take you again

within my womb, your amniotic lair,
and further spin you back

through nine waxing months
to the split seeding moment

you chose to be made flesh,
word within me.

I'd cancel the love feast
the hot night of your making.

I would travel alone
to a quiet mossy place,

you would spill from me into the earth
drop by bright red drop.
from the book AS IF BY MAGIC / Wake Forest University Press
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Stylized color illustration of Fernando Pessoa at a desk
"He believed he was 'less real' than his alter egos, one of whom wrote: 'Strictly speaking, Fernando Pessoa doesn’t exist.' As Zenith puts it, 'No writer can rival Pessoa’s achievement in configuring, through his heteronyms, radically different poetic and philosophical attitudes that formed a glorious if not always harmonious musical ensemble.'"

via NEW STATESMAN
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Cover of Emily Kendal Frey's book, Lovability

"In Lovability, poem after poem seeks discernment against this agony, to untangle the sticky web of the imagined, the hoped for, the dreaded, the real, and encounter each unbraced. Perhaps this is the only project that matters. Perhaps it’s one of the most difficult things a person undergoes: the dismantling of dream, assumption, expectation, prejudice, in order to see clearly and honestly."
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