Westminster Poets

I will never be
memorialised in stone
on a stone floor in that
famous church fraternity -
unheard, unknown, I
just am and my words
speak of me seriously
but - just a woman
I am no man
and no men will laud
what they don't understand.

Where is my home?
I speak of roads and
lack, of hopes dissolved
and the rising tide of griefs
the place I was born
in memory and photographs -
the mystery unsolved
of how I came and
what I thought, did, passed,
drowned in emotion. 

There are no sonorous eulogies
there are no family lips -
all the beating hearts have stopped
and time ran out:  an empty
bottle.  Where did I sojourn?
In many faceless places
windows on my rooms
but no space to live and breathe.

It has been a time of sunderings
and hard work, cold mornings
when I did not want to go,
but always had to,
the claim of elsewhere
and the burden of money.

I stand looking down at them:
all the names and words I love -
an exclusive club, its
heavy gates barred today
by current keepers, representatives
who can't see me
who can't read the runes
of the times, can't touch
what's real.  They speak a
different language
from the words I dug.

And so I walk
and claim my time - the magic
hour not mine.  In those
hallowed ancient halls
they point at me:  I am no poet
I merely squawk

of all the things I loved
now gone, my gauge
with me, of sensitive
of dreaming hopes and fading
time:  the magnetic hour not mine.

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