St Godfric gets canonised

three sheep and a sharp wind, behind
which I feel involvement start
to tug. Not at all like the song I composed
halfway up Wear’s Bank. It’s happening
too early, before I’m actually dead. This
park bench and the beck’s trickle are far
too significant all of a sudden. To think
I started off a hustler and canny lad
shuttling round the med. I am still life
with honey, turf, and my sainthood now;
it sits near like next week.

For a while I thought this would be easy––
quick chopping-up for a wiki page, a few
photo ops with the big man, some bells.
Thomas Beckett called by and said it’d be dandy,
clearly codswallop given the news.
Turns out I’m trying to keep hold
of my songs even in sleep, Aelfric says,
and names swell like my ankle without
warning. The pain is coming off easy,
in dock-leaf bundles, but the trouble
of all this big knowing! So many
big decisions on the swings and slides
and things called cellphones–– leaking in like chemistry
making of my bones a lattice of quartz
and amethyst. O I am tied to a balloon of spirit
hovering over all the songs I almost wrote.

Joe Wright’s work has been published in Anthropocene, Carmen et Error, The Mays 32, The Madrigal, and The Little Review. He was a Foyle Young Poet, T.S. Eliot Prize Young Critic, and was a guest editor for Anthropocene. He studies at Magdalene College, Cambridge.