Two Poems by David Havird
The Spell
Ακολουθει
I picture you with a knife
in one hand, the sandal
upside down in the other,
wanting a third
to handle the mirror.
Follow me
your footprints spell
in the dust. Amid the rubble
on either side
of the Street of Tombs,
not a stele standing. Where
have you swished off to, cruised
through what gate’s leer
(I’ve come ashore
with harpoon eyes),
toxic white
with mulberry lips,
swinging your hips like a fishtail?
Upon This Rock
Two days of it, wind from Africa
shoving the sea from its bed. The Sahara
erased the horizon, hazed the islands
from view. But now, across a bay as blue
as it is calm, as blue as the churches are white,
on the tip of each of two narrow peninsulas
gleamingly white—across the shimmering bay
a fishing boat putters. Over my shoulder
a dove coos; farther inland the bells
of the blue-domed basilica toll:
call and response. When next, from down below,
from somewhere amid the stand of pines
between this place and the shoreline,
a rooster crows, I go in my mind,
I shoulder my way—head down,
again I am butting my way through the wind
to the edge of the cliff: wind-steepened waves,
a crown, and wind-torn wisps like tatting,
the sea, a god’s bulk, bursting against the face
of the cliff, the depths like batting
up through a hole in a boulder
exploding. Hearing the rooster, I picture the rock
hawking the sea from its throat;
I think of the fisherman Peter
erupting with curses, in agony crowing.
About the author
David Havird is the author of two collections, "Map Home" (2013) and "Penelope's Design"(2010), which won the 2009 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. His…
Read the full bioIssue 23 · November 2015
Table of contents
- From the editors
- Poetry
- Two Poems by F. J. Williams
- Imaginary Oceans
- Thessaloniki, Four AM
- Koinonia Farms
- Night Flight
- Two Poems by Sarah J. Sloat
- The Lounge Lizard
- Fear in Kenya
- Holland
- Cretan Love Letter
- Two Poems by David Havird
- Yukon River Aurora
- Night Becomes Day Over the West
- Vignette, Townhouse, 9 a.m.
- Two poems by Anne Babson
- Postcard Prose
- Travel Notes