Poems by Elizabeth Burns

Elizabeth Burns' third collection of poetry is forthcoming in 2007, and her work has also been published in various magazines and anthologies. She teaches creative writing in Lancaster, and has also done so at UCLan.

Canaries

Out from the hot coast of Africa
a scattering of islands speckle the ocean,
the last of land before the New World looms.

This is where the slave ship docks:
a place of hummingbirds and bougainvillea,
of seacliffs and white lilies.

They call it paradise.
The crew are heady with it:
dry land, fresh fish, sweet wine,
rose-scented women at the harbour.

The cargo stay on board,
rammed in the hold. A mother
calls her daughter’s name,
reaches out to touch her in the dark

but she’s gone, she is chosen,
she is the one who is transacted
for the bright yellow birds
whose song entrances the captain
who will have hat he desires.

She will not stoop in fields of sugarcane
but here, alone, is locked inside
s hot dark room. Outside,
the crash of waves on rock.

She’s drenched in perfumes,
smeared with oils until she gleams.
She will become canary-bird.

Her smile is fixed. She cannot speak.
She knows no words. Her gritted
teeth, her fierce eye open
in the dark, her clotted
tongue forced into someone else’s mouth.

Pale gold feathers float on water.

The tide smacks at the cliff.

The ship sets sail for the Americas.

Below the deck, his lemon-yellow birds
grow sickly, their tiny bodies quivering.
He brings them out to breathes sea air,
gives them drinks of fresh-water
and strokes their dappled feathers,
soft as peach-down.

Should he open up the cages, let them fly?
Would they hover by the boat as seabirds do
or disappear into horizon
though there is nothing there to feed on?

He has known slaves do the same:
has seen them leap from ships
and choose to drown themselves.

He plumps with seed., he prises beaks apart
to force in grain. These goods
are precious. He cannot let them starve.
Nor fly: he keeps the cages closed.

Her gleaning skin. Her fierce eye open
in the dark. She has nightmares
of her mother, stuffed into the ship’s hold:

a woman gorged on gruel, believing
she is fattened up for eating
and weeping in the stinking dark
for a daughter left on an island
bartered for a songbird.

The squawk of fledglings.
The shunt of chains.

Feathers drifting up through rigging.

Eyes in the dark. Locked cages.

Birdsong. Saltwater. Sickness.

The shipload lurches out across Atlantic
Dragging its freight towards another continent.

Sickness. Saltwater. Birdsong.

From The Gift of Light (Diehard, 2000).

An eighteenth century experiment

If you were to scoop a cup of water up,
here where the river mingles with the sea,
freshwater, saltwater twisting over rocks
could you tell if the droplets were those

which had travelled down the valley
from the hills, knowing only silty, pebbly
river bed, bearing only twigs, fish, leaves,
perhaps the carcass of a sheep?

Would you know if this were water from the ocean
brought here by the rush of estuary
as it shoves itself inland, a high tide deep enough
to bring a slaveship right up to the quayside?

Could you tell if this were water which had floated
one of those well-built vessels, its hold full
of sugar, cotton, chocolate and mahogany,
or glass beads and whisky, or human beings?

Could you tell which were the drops that formed the waves
that held the bloated body of one thrown overboard?
Or is this simply water from the hills,
clear and cold as a spring?

And another question: if you were to break
two eggs – one brown, one white – into a bowl
could you tell from either of the golden yolks
what was the colour of its shell?