Northern Line
On the platform, a waiting hum.
Patience of night. A few faces
scan and watch, scan and watch.
This is an invisible rainforest.
A girl like a statue in a long black dress
has one hand uplifted – royal, graceful.
The unseen rain falls about her
with a silent flicker, in a pattern.
On her raised hand, a jewel. Ladybird.
It stars her finger, bright animate stone.
Her green eyes bloom like gardens
and trails of light run down her arm.
She is waiting to cross into the realm of sight.
Her vision has already gone ahead. The tunnel
is the night sky, wall of stars to breach.
Ladybird, star of stars, show her the rain, the forest.
Clarissa Aykroyd is originally from Victoria, Canada. She has also lived in Dublin and is now a resident of London. Her poems have recently appeared in Shot Glass Journal. She is also the author of a blog on poetry and poets, The Stone and the Star (http://thestoneandthestar.blogspot.com/).
I am fascinated by the various juxtapositions which I find in this poem: stasis and motion, silence and sound, the visible and the invisible, stationary but dynamic anticipation on the edge of vigorous forward movement. It’s like a photograph which comes alive and breathes while remaining curiously a photograph–you just catch the fact that it has come to life out of the corner of you eye, when you look obliquely, but not head on. It whispers and buzzes–silently–and I find it altogether lovely.
If there was an anthology of Underground/Metro/Subway poems, this poem would easily stand alongside ‘In a Station of the Metro’ by Ezra Pound.
I like the particular way you use ‘stars’ as a verb (“It stars her finger”).
Excellent.