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Two
poems from Chris Preddle's collection, Variations on
Sappho 95
followed
by a note on the author
Porteous
for
Katrina
Looking up something else I've found your surname
defined in the OED. A porteous
was the breviary of the medieval church, the daily office
it chose to ordain
for
the ordained. Once I would make use of
Thomas's Imitation like that. 'For there is no man
without his faults,' said the Penguin translation, 'none without
his burden.'
Such words, I thought, were a poet's,
though
he wrote in the name of Christ pinned out
like his own windingsheet. There's no such book
I would resort to now, but abandon all
I've
slept on like pillows for the intellect. In doubt
let's turn as you turn back
to the material boats, beach and sea at Beadnell.
The
Christian People
This olive tree remembers the Byzantine empire,
while we, in its half-shade
on your birthday, can reckon up a mere
sixty-one
years. Its several trunks anfractuous and fissured
look dead where the bark draws back
with a thick-lipped grin. The tree's become, as it should have,
Byzantine
in complexity, like Justinian's law books.
It still bears olives. We spread the net
for windfalls, on our hands and knees at its beck-
and-call
in the crawlspace under it. Waiting in winter
for the harvest, waiting as in an anteroom
for favour or at the icon screen for a covenant,
we
too remember our City, ours for a time,
withheld like Christ in the empyrean
from us the Christian people of Byzantium.
©
Chris Preddle was born in London in 1943 and
educated at Stonyhurst College and Oxford University. A librarian
until his retirement, he lives in Holme, West Yorkshire. Chris
has one previous collection, Bonobos (Biscuit Publishing,
Newcastle upon Tyne, 2001), and his poems have appeared in various
magazines, including Poetry Review, The Rialto,
The Shop, and Smiths Knoll. He won the Biscuit Poetry
Prize in 2001 and the Yorkshire Prize in the Yorkshire Open Poetry
Competition in 2005.
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