Susan Utting
POEMS
Dreamer
When the body sleeps, at first it turns
anti-clockwise, winds itself in search of some sweet
swaddled infancy where sleep comes rocked and lulled
by chanted spells, by Jeannie with the light brown hair,
the smiling angels up above you, the husky whisperings
of weary motherers.
The sleeping body grows,
turns its tricks, ages, becomes that strange country
where cliff-edge fallers hang in the air, where even
journeys along straight, familiar roads don’t end in home;
where lines once known by heart stay on the edge
of the mind’s eye, the tip of the idle tongue.
And while it frets
and spins through all those restless tropes and lullabies,
as it takes on the marks of its own weight - a creased
cheek, an etched forearm, the scars of another life -
the sleeping body turns itself again clockwise,
searching for its rescuer, its clear-eyed, waking self.
shortlisted for the Owen Barfield Prize
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