Poetry from Carol Stewart

Photo: Hello I’m Nik

The World Is Full of Those Who Bear Its Weight

Now and then,
I tell him my dreams
like when he turned into a giant
Lego brick, playing
catch me if you can
up and down the stairs

or when he unleashed
an antlered pig into the guest room;
how could he be so dirty
to think I’d welcome such a pet?

A flinch of a needle-line smile,
micro-spark in the eye,
brow momentarily raised
above the verbose

volume contained in a tattered cover,
jiggered spine,

and he’s back to gathering facts
picked at and pecked like a worm
in the finicky beak of a ravenous blackbird.

He ought to be on The Chase,
not trailing
hunched on his way to the graveyard shift
packing haggis,

bringing it home,
keeping it wrapped in a separate fridge,
friends from overseas convinced
that this is how all Scotsmen chill,
the chieftain o’ the puddin’ race confused
with the sleekit, tim’rous beastie.

A red brick, did you say?
I close the door on his purples,
his airless, draped maroons,
and breeze into my bright,
if somewhat icy, open plan.
.

.

Carol Stewart is a mother and grandmother living in the Scottish Borders. A former freelance editor, her poems have recently been published (or are forthcoming) in a number of journals including Abstract Contemporary Expressions, That (Literary Review), Gravitas, Panoply, Coffin Bell, Change Seven, Book Smuggler’s Den and The Beautiful Cadaver Project.