St Clement Morning before birth, almost-parents circling mud paths of Green Pool. In Peter’s footprints he stepped to quarry, stamped grounds with pickaxe, gorged stone with clear gushings and quenched those breaking rocks in hot
St Clement
Morning before birth,
almost-parents circling
mud paths of Green Pool.
In Peter’s footprints
he stepped to quarry,
stamped grounds
with pickaxe, gorged
stone with clear gushings
and quenched those
breaking rocks in hot sun -
but like Sonny said; the law won.
Strapped to sinking steel,
neck anchor-noosed
as marine crucifix,
this mason is sainted in
marginal straights
where sapropels flare
in thunderstorm fest -
locals call it leviathan blinking.
Aruna guards anthropogenic
shrine with sharpened shinbone
through brackish tide. In Peter’s
footprints we step Crimean
shores, collecting psalters -
sure, steadfast - entering
the veil, into brine
with nets, with chain,
to forge meek gnadenstuhls
in martyred memory.
Each birthday morning
we pilgrimage that cycle;
passing grace to earth.
R. M. Francis
R. M. Francis is from Dudley. He’s a lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and author of five poetry pamphlet collections. His debut novel, Bella, is out in March 2020 with Wild Pressed Books, and Smokestack books will publish his first full collection of poems, Subsidence, in October 2020. In 2019 he was the inaugural David Bradshaw Writer in Residence at the University of Oxford; these four poems began during that residency.