Four Poems by Claire Booker

Midnight Shore

Water has stretched to fold us a sea –
your salty warmth blankets my limbs.

Love glides between galaxies
pierced by stars.

This rose of a night, so sharp and sweet,
gravid with stillness.

We are porous, chimerical –
the creatures inside us stirring.

I fill with your tide, you with mine.
If this has a name, I have no need to call it.

Amma-ji Goes on Haj

i.m. Salima

We only know that she is far
on her night journey, tiptoeing up each star
in her white sari, ever closer to the Scorpion’s sting.

Soon she will forget how
she worked cotton into peacocks and palm trees,
slipped us secret generosities in envelopes.

Those feet that felt nothing for forty years,
will step onto the crescent moon
and dance to the great heartbeat of the Brahmaputra.

On its broad lap, boats are sailing away
with her treasures – six children, the man who was her hearth,
the flame and spark of it,

and prayer –
five wellsprings of the struggling day in which to dip
an ailing body.

Soon she will bathe in the light
of ninety-nine moons, her worn wrists with their gold bangles
grown lithe again.

She who knew only four walls, will dive in the ten directions.
She who knew the names of fifth cousins,
will know only one name –

the Ka’bah finally within fingers’ reach.

Saint Bride’s Cows

Acetone snorts, sharp square rumps,
worshipping with their lips

at the tower’s foot.
Sky. So much more of it here.

Winds scourge us as we circle –
plastic-wrapped urbanites lifting our arms

in unison, as if baling up
against the threat of foul weather.

Heal us of our sickness, Bride,
let us not become barren.

The herd crops around us, udders slung low,
bulging for lost calves.

I spot her high on the tower, face against flank,
milking with stone fingers.

Patron of poets, newborns, fugitives,
send us a wind-swept word.

In the Stillness

I sit by my Tibetan Vajra bell,
a single candle lit,

a sheaf of her poems, signed
in that quiet hand.

No longer ballasted with breath
or bone, she surfaces

from the flimsy dark
strung magically on her own notes.

Months disperse, like a sea mist lifting:
those mornings I followed her

further and further along the spit –
her diminishing form

bent in awe of shells I crushed
without seeing.

She wrapped her words in paper.
How freely she offers them to me now.

Claire Booker lives on the South Downs near Brighton and was longlisted in the 2023 National Poetry Competition. Her nature-themed collection A Pocketful of Chalk [/] is out with Arachne Press. She blogs at www.bookerplays.co.uk

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