Three poems by Geoffrey Heptonstall
Geoffrey Heptonstall's recent publications include a novel, Heaven's Invention [Black Wolf Editions], poetry for the Coffee House Anthology, the High Window,, Penwood Review and Poetry Pacific. Recent stories have appeared in Bandit Fiction, Fiction Week and Scarlet Leaf Review. Recent essays have appeared in the London Magazine, London Progressive Journal and Montreal Review.
BERLIN
Today
Echoes along the wall
in this city of bridges
across history with water flowing
from peace to war and back again.
The government elects its people
as the walls erect their stones.
Yesterday
An artist draws a circle of chalk
and Berlin becomes the moon
with dust on which a poet walks
as an innocent to the gallows,
as a book to be forever unread,
as a song without music,
as a thought without words.
Tomorrow
When the beasts have fled their cages,
making for the forest night.
And the sky is void of stars
until the sun’s rising
from memory and the eternal record
of how a people find their city
inside the streets that map the world.
SISYPHUS: OF PUNISHMENT
Slowly the stone begins to roll.
the gathering crows applauds
until scattered by the crash.
The fall was foretold.
We know how it shall end.
The ascent was ever uncertain,
An incline too severe
for mortal hands to raise
the weight of the world.
A god-like task for a man,
that casts its curse in memory.
The stone has no forgiving.
AT THE WHALING PORT
A gothic arch of bones
raised as the whalers’ memorial,
shameless relic of conquest,
of the hunter’s harpoon thrust
in the darkness, in the deeps
before the pursuer is pursued
over a less than celestial sea
by that monster, mortality.
Feel the wound as you pass through.
where the headland ends in a storm
warning of the silence spoken
by the god of these graves.
So many Ishmaels sleep beneath these stones,
all named testaments certain
of heroic acts, necessary lives
with no room for doubt aboard.
The sea whale guides the fishermen home
to the harbour’s star-like lights.
Maritime museums tell none of this.
Leviathan is the watchword
luring boys at play to men’s work.
They sign on to the ship
that sails to the world’s end,
a sea of blood, an isle of bones.
