Déjà Vu
Once more I’m caught on the sly hook of your voice
and hauled out gasping into a toxic world.
Lifetimes billow and vanish like haunted clouds:
I race through the woods,
but your word-arrows find me;
I soar overhead,
you shoot me down with a glance.
The end is always the same.
Gutted, cooked and carved,
I’m served up steaming on your table.
The inexhaustible banquet,
your cut-and-come-again daughter.
Gemma Harland lives with her family in the lost Yorkshire town of Cheswich. She is currently working with singer-songwriter Alistair Cumberford (of the band Real PD) and Texan artist-animator Joseph Devens to bring her poems to life in different media. https://www.facebook.com/Gemma-Harland-poems-319189402106183