‘Morn’ by John Goodby
At three with the secrets of the world
We turn when you come to bed
From the well I had not understood
The breath you have been working
For hours have come to me after
A few lines of a poem blurred
Blues and greens just fallen asleep
As the space mirrors the universe
With its floating fall, mortal scripts
Position its dots of existence
Its embedded fossils, cave paintings
Brushed against symbols branded lightly
John Goodby lectures at the University of Swansea. He is the author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (2013), and edited the Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (2014). He has published translations into English of Heinrich Heine, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Pierre Reverdy and the Algerian poet Adel Soleïman Guèmar (with Tom Cheesman), and of Irish women poets into Spanish as No Soy Tu Musa (2008, with Carlota Caulfield). His own books of poetry include uncaged sea (2007), Illennium (Shearsman, 2010), and A True Prize (Cinnamon, 2011). His poems have won prizes in the Arvon/Observer (1990) and Cardiff International Poetry (2006) competitions and feature in the Forward’s Poems of the Decade (2012). Mine arch never marble (Argotist Online) and The No Breath (Red Ceilings Press) are forthcoming in 2017, as is the anthology The Edge of Necessary: Welsh Innovative Poetry 1966–2016 (Aquifer Press, with Lyndon Davies).
‘Morn’ is featured in Issue Seven of The Lonely Crowd, alongside three other new poems by John Goodby.
Copyright © John Goodby, 2017. Image © Jo Mazelis, 2017.