Anton Floyd - Warrior Queen - after Adrienne Rich

Anton Floyd was born in Egypt, a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin and University College, Cork. He has worked in the eastern Mediterranean and now lives in West Cork. Poems widely published in Ireland and internationally. A member of Irish Haiku Society, he is several times winner of International Haiku Competitions. A selection of haiku is included in Between the Leaves, an anthology of new haiku writing from Ireland edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky (Arlen House, 2016). His first poetry collection, Falling into Place was published by Revival Press in 2018. He edited Remembrance Suite, a chapbook of sonnets by Shirin Sabri (Glóir, 2018) and an international anthology of poems, Point by Point (Glóir, 2018). He received the 2019 Literary Prize awarded by the Dazzling Spark Arts Foundation (University of Macau, China). A new collection, Depositions is forthcoming from Revival Press in 2021.

Warrior Queen - after Adrienne Rich

for Moze Jacobs

I imagine the cairn of her resistance. Because she loves the land she places each stone for large or simple reasons. This is her work of hands, the weight of the sun bearing down on her back. The prototype exists on Knocknarea; a sign to protect a queen’s lands. And real as stones are, limestones worn smooth by wind and rain will, one day, all be gone. Her poems, her mythic syllables, painfully assembled, will outlast a pile of stones and more than stones will guard us all from fears that flood the mind.

1. Leaf by Leaf

for Richard W Halperin

And I feel how leaf by leaf deepening shadows flood the trees; and sunset’s secret is a slow and steady coming on. I cannot guess at the weight of shadows; those private griefs we all shore up, minute by minute, that taste of wormwood on the tongue. While words like splints of thought might stem this gathering mood they cannot, hour by hour, prevent what this slow dusk draws down: It mutes birdsong. Petals fold shut. Wounds close. And at the finish, what?

2. Blue Day

Only pain and love are real you said that blue day with the smell of olive trees beyond blue water and rims of sand. The cries of seabirds were turning blue, the blue of the peacock feather I imagine the toque-hatted lady of your childhood wore at a jaunty angle. I see the feather poised in the air like that leap into the void. The gelatin image of it, in my mind’s eye, is tinted the same blue as the lines of your poem - words connecting unseeable distances. I sail them now, enter into the still centre of that day learning of love’s genius by the exquisite pain of loss.

Our Sapling Oak

i.m. Adrienne Rich

In your name I plant this oak. You loved the land and could see the country bought and sold, a final stand of trees laid waste, the persecuted becoming shadows. This tree marks your resistance. I should say ours, to honour the common weal, to bring it back into light from the edge of dread where it has retreated. This sapling, these bare stems, pared down, vulnerable, vital, simple as breath rooted in silence, history will record: an unremarkable oak made a forest.