Mary Mulholland

South rim, grand canyon

As if sliced by an axe, the plateau
reveals its internal bruising,
indigo, purple, blue.
Sky is the milk of pre-dawn.
There’s ice underfoot,
and stones boasting their age.
A black one barely changed
in ninety million years,
while I can’t reconnect
with four decades ago.
Feelings don’t work in memory.
They leave an afterimage.
So you see sadness in a wedding pic
when the decree nisi arrives.
If not, people are colourblind.
A bird dives into the chasm,
a trace memory of song,
and the path curves to the left,
five elk, mothers and young
raise heads, puff clouds
from nostrils, one growls.
Our eyes meet, I raise a hand
in peace, feign death, standing.

Mary Mulholland’s poems are widely published, most recently in Under the Radar, Abridged, And Other Poems, Perverse, and forthcoming in Magma and Stand. She’s also often mentioned in competitions, most recently as a finalist in the Winchester Prize. Her debut pamphlet was published by Live Canon, and she has two collaborations with Nine Pens.  www.marymulholland.co.uk  Twitter/ Instagram: @marymulhol

Mary wrote the following about her poem:

I think we've all had experiences that touch our core, when we feel at one with the universe and everything briefly coheres. I first found this at the Grand Canyon when, at twenty, I spent a summer working there. Its majesty, my smallness.  Years later, with a lot going on in my life, I revisited the Grand Canyon, and found it inevitably far more commercialised, even though there was something that couldn’t be tamed. My early morning encounter with the elk was real and reignited the essence of the place for me. I like it that in Native American tradition the elk symbolises dignity and following the right path.