Michael Lee Rattigan – 3 poems

 

Going vertical

Seek an expression
that isn’t thunder’s crack but latch’s click,
comes from the day in overheard talk,
hot milk as it foams,
light as it glances off radio flow.

What Langston heard in the open air
on Independence Avenue,
where the music seemed to cry cry cry,
but words seemed to laugh –
hovers over day’s jagged music,
its calm, urgency, air.

 

Favourite words

“Salty”, because there’s taste in its saying,
in “tremor” the moment’s lap,
with “terse”: taut, keen stress.

Put them together for poetic kick,
the verbal savour of a line
now to be written:
                                salty terse tremor.

 

Chosen routine

The words don’t know, neither do I.
Whatever it is, it is.
Whatever it was, it was.
Whatever is, is more than it is,
less than it will be.
No point asking me. Ask yourself.
Ask yourself because the words don’t know,
nor I or anyone else. Do you really know?

Admit you don’t know.
Admit you don’t really care whether I know
(I don’t), nor that anyone else really knows (they don’t).
Whatever it is, it is.
Whatever it was, it was.
Whatever is, is more than it is,
less than it will be.
Neither of us, nor anyone else, knows.

 

Michael Lee Rattigan was born in Croydon, England. Through rufus books he has published “Nature Notes” and a translation of Fernando Pessoa’s Caeiro poems. A full-length collection of poems, “Between Places” is upcoming with rufus books. He currently enjoys being interrupted from anything resembling work by his young niece, Meadow.