George Neame

music for leaving our planet

let me take you
to the doldrums of a sunday 

            a bitter malted stout in a hand
            laid slack over the arm of the couch.  

let me take you
            to the carton of a television set
            crackling in and out of orbit around our lives.

and you played that music for leaving our planet
that moves forwards and backwards in equal measures 

xylophone quivers
like porcelain plates                 synthesise rocket fuel
into dust strum

aluminium under the temple church organ.

let me take you now
through the fields out back
to the gravitational centre of barley where
we can trace the trajectory
of the next seven days above our heads

smooth and purposeful and uninterrupted
and can you still point out the star where we last saw him
where we last strained our ears 

for a cautious shudder of strings           

            cellos echoing              through a tentative
3/4 time signature.

let me take you
come on we’re getting close now
to finding the last note of that
music for leaving the planet
let me take you
           to a time when sunlight outpaced
            us as we readied ourselves for bed
let me take you to a blue marble reflection
in our bathroom mirror and the fingerprints
of an astronaut’s glove sketched in frost
on the post box 

            and though you told me that it could have been any glove
          and though you told me that most of those stars
            have been dead for a thousand years

we still traced the milky way like snowfall

because god didn’t that shuttle look just like
                       the model that once hung immobile
above my bunkbed           

            and god didn’t that last transmission
sound almost as if         but wait let me take you last of all

to the airfield
            let me take you to the amphitheatre
where the audience creases to your command

let me take you to ground control and to the orchestra pit
let me take you
to the rostrum the launch pad the baton the switch

and let me take you to
five                  ready
four                  engines
three                ignition
two                  symphony
one

George Neame currently lives in London, but in recent years has lived in Tennessee, Dublin and Leeds. In 2016 he won the University of Nottingham’s Kirk White Poetry Prize, and his poetry has since been published in various journals including Acumen, the moth, Antiphon, Ink, Sweat & Tears and most recently One Hand Clapping. In his spare time, George enjoys long walks, pub quizzes, and gallons of strong coffee.