Poetry Monday: The Hanged Pigeon

OMGYOUGUYS. Favourite day of the week. POETRY MONDAY. This will be the last one of 2015 and it couldn't be a better finish. It's so, so fitting for this year.

Then go and buy Jo Brandon's newest poetry collection because it will give you all the feels, with all the words, that build and make and do.

The Hanged Pigeon, by Jo Brandon

You are more stark even

than the tarot card I turned at fourteen:

the Hanged Man, macabre and ridiculous,

his strangled leg, ankle noose, freefall of hair,

the hard jewel colours I still associate with death

though the book said it represented rebirth –

I heard the elliptical Chorus whisper-sing

first-death, first-death.

I flipped your card walking through the park

on a day when the sky was too blue

to be anything other than an illusion;

you hung like a bauble on a tree, a faded Robin maybe

whose claws should fold easily over the branches, rigid as tradition,

but has slipped upside down – and now nothing looks right –

strung up with tangerine mesh you were an omen

of something.

You wished so hard to avoid the predictable

that your wings had started to come away,

and all the vinegar and glue and brown paper

salvaged from those park bins

couldn’t have put you back together again.

You might have appeared to me as Icarus or

a penny dreadful, but you struck me as the Hanged Man;

not so serene, not so willing to give yourself up as deeper meaning.

As I spoke to you, tried to soothe you up in your tree

I could have been in a fairy-tale asking boons

of any unbelievable creature; you might transform,

burst from your pigeon chrysalis or you might grow still

and provide a medieval spectacle for nine-to-fivers on lunch.

A comic strip of heroic deeds ran through my head; ladders,

broken branches, clambering, soft landing, gasps, free-flight

–  I left unsure of what I did and didn’t do to rescue you.

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Big hugs and lots of love,
Essss