Eleanor Hooker

Exquisite Corpse

Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.
                                           Louise Glück

An ordinary hungry family,
whose dead disturb woodlands
when ghost-rain falls from their hair,
and sky drops from the sky
in that tangled world they call home.
Their father, which art in heaven,
cannot stop, nor small talk
when hounding a hare,
for his ordinary hungry family,
vast as a Belfast sink. 
Marry me, oh marry me do,
their sister sings to benighted day,
as their dead derange trees
with their taste for bark-blood,
soul-mulch and Ms. Britain's
new young face, that will cost them the earth.

Down

                      Tumbling, 
you grab fistfuls of light before reaching the Fells.
Your mind is filled with goose-down,
clusters the size of dandelion clocks, and soft as lanugo.
                      You think, I'll not make it out alive.
You set down the light you stole from the sun,
but realise you are decades of dark-time too late.
                       Can you hear me? Are you still there?
Climb through a tear in time to find yourself
in the roof of the world, a sky-woman come of age,
but as this is the season for departures,
you let go, fall through frigid, vacant air.

Eleanor Hooker's second poetry collection A Tug of Blue (Dedalus Press) was published October 2016. She holds an M.Phil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin. Eleanor is an RNLI helm. www.eleanorhooker.com