Fairies

There is little to be told about them really:
they took my teeth, left modest coins
and a note sometimes on paper blue,

detailing private lives among frogs and wrens,
schemes for the bloody stumps, the writing crazed
as a butterfly’s flight

or thistle seed on breeze and yet, of these frail things,
it is hard to imagine the lugging of sixpences
or sabotage of hen houses or milk pails,

conflating them with all those wild agencies
beyond the homely sill – the tinker tricks, the animals –
the stolen mind of grandpa, his stramash of memory…

Away with the fairies : on some tumescent hill I flick
his fairy picture book – Victorian children
photographed in chiffon wisps…

Here comes a real one now – sticky wings enmeshed
in the lines of this poem. Fast and deft, my hands, I clap.
She twinkles and dissolves to innocence.

 

 

Clive Donovan devotes himself full-time to poetry and has published in a wide variety of magazines including The Journal, Agenda, Acumen, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prole, Stand, Ink Sweat & Tears and The Transnational. He is hoping to entice a publisher to print a first collection.