James Simpson

Tiger Head Sonnets

XVIII

My grandfather searches for flints, for bulb fractures, for shatter marks. A kestrel is rising like smoke over tumuli.

There were kisses in words, parcels of silks like petals, carved wooden gods with elephant heads.

For in the end he knew she was the miracle itself, the secret which every god refuses to utter, that we are all, forever, incarnate.

XIX

The days pass when we too turn to amber, when we too fail the clotted earth.

Pheasants crank wheel through beech woods, mist hangs in the long grass and burnished leaves journey imperceptibly through fathoms of air.

Behold Blind Tiger you have been disfigured for us and carry all our sorrows;

for we are greater at our method of counting, allocating numbers to the dead.