Rose Mary Boehm- Three Poems

The Shipwreck

The cold rusted walls

empty of resonance.

No home

for the shadows

breathing green waters,

held in the cradles of algae.

The kelpies took

and gave nothing.

It was like this,

that shipwreck.

How you left only a hull

vacant of vigor. And nothing

can resurrect me.

Principles of Perceptual Organization

There is more to me than the sum of my parts.

Close enough to move in a blur, as fast

as the trees we pass in the car, all the way

to the vanishing point.  Perception, touch,

your skin, your breath, a bell across

the old field, the blues from my neighbour’s

orange windows. My hands rough from soap suds,

hoping my baby won’t wake.

Walking out in the night garden,

I think about that kid who offered

to mow the high grass with a sickle.

I ought to call him in the morning.

You have never left. Shaper of twenty

long years during which I grew bigger

inside. The chamber you left empty,

like a womb which never shrunk back.

The Hunter

Sitting mute, yet alert. Suspended above

a patchwork of last greens opens into blue

where all was summer somber. Gold and russet

tumble, carried on late-summer’s breath.

The sun falls fast, no longer press ganged

into overtime by August. September, a ripe woman,

still beautiful and full of promise, before

November's storms blow away illusions.

When the graphite fence posts acquire a glow

in the evening rays, when their shadows lengthen

and draw outlandish graphics on the straw-coloured

grasses, when the air is burgundy between the leaf

and the  last of the summer wine,

you ready your camera to bring in the bounty.

A German-born UK national, Rose Mary Boehm lives and works in Lima, Peru. Author of two novels and a poetry collection published in 2011 in the UK, ‘TANGENTS’, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a good two dozen US poetry reviews as well as some print anthologies, and Diane Lockward’s The Crafty Poet. She won third price in in the 2009 Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (US), and has been a finalist in several GR contests, winning it in October 2014.