PENNY BLACKBURN

★ ★ ★ ★

POETRY

I am the one who puts them there

Every night a different dream.
In some you drown, in others burn.
In one you shrink, size reflecting
your sense of insignificance.
Another sees you stretched
– skyscraper wide and full of falling.

When you wake – not sweating
but shaken dry – you tell me
half remembered details.
I cup your cheek, press a palm
to your heart; the pounding slows.
Your limbic system relaxes.

I feel your frustration – the words
don’t do justice to the fear that held you.
Don’t worry – I know what your dreams do
deep inside your mind.

We All Bought into the Myth

of intense passion – undeniable,
burning. We repeated the clichés
among ourselves, soothing words about
the moth to the flame, how he was
your Heathcliff. We wanted
to believe it was something more
than the common-or-garden
abusive relationship.

You told yourself lies to make
a truth for us: the in-betweens
make up for the fights; he’s fine
most of the time; things
are not as bad as they look.

We all watched as, like a child
with a pencil, he snapped you

into smaller and smaller bits.

When They Call Something a Warzone

what they usually mean
is the loudness of battle: the clacking
of AK47s, the rumble, two streets away,
of somebody else’s tanks.
Or they think of grainy night-time news footage
of raids, a flash of explosions
dimmed and small upon the TV screen.

I think of the other meaning –
where the war has been. Craters and rubble mounds,
holes in the walls of family
homes, hastily strung screens
opposing the darkness.
Someone cooking beans in a blackened pot.
You still need
to eat, even when all you know
is in ruins. When your children
are blank-eyed, worse than dead
and no-one is looking.