Three Poems by George Reiner
the swallows came thrice
↑
My dad pointed his ruler arm
mispronounced their Latin name
to announce summer’s
arrival of better days.
The swallows’ quiet gossip
farmstead pylon
pulsated electric signals
into my fledgling brain.
I noted their English
but my pen holding hand
newly grown down
did not murmur
with their agile grace.
I stood hand over eyes
as everywhere became horizon
to pray for the red jacket
my dad preened
would turn true feathers
and fly me home
but memory doesn’t make family.
↓
On the balcony
white paint chipped away
my head remembered the angle
when age was important
and hatching not yet history.
I saw the swallows before my father
a first flight for our family.
Between Cairene apartments
a migration ahead
that promise of better days
in thermal currents
did not answer
my parental concern.
Wire thin tail
and blood-red throat and forehead
criss-crossed heaven’s floor
with nowhere to go
spread flames
into skies so clear
you think it cloudy
and put the city to shade.
In my life and his
I sang every morning
but his hard hearing
and my memory
swallow nest thick
made the chorus a seance
and ouija boards their perches.
A flight path apology
doesn’t make a remedy.
↑
They look lower this year
atmosphere collapse
their wings butter blunt
struggle
to cut through rain
and puncture past.
They arrived in one’s and two’s
with their small white windows
snowdrop harmonise
back and forth
low above the ground
the swallows mis-
took the rain
for flying insects,
but still fed their children
despite the reflection.
My eyes followed the flight
to my dad’s smile, that electric pylon
and I apologised
for adding rain drops to their feathers
and I thanked my dad
for helping me believe
swallows make a summer.
we are not the sun
new neon
drowns in heliocentric embrace
but on kinship’s orbit journey
finds a field to glean the day
waxing wheat
decorates skin seeds shine
lightyears slow down the
ministers’ overcast myths
crescent cream
smoke dresses his leaky
halo pours every silk sound
over the family roof
waning white
pulls the oceans to erode
his bodyshore stitched
together with consolations
full flower
december blossom dances
in endless alchemist circles
till bones bend the clouds
gaze
at night’s orifice
and think
we
don’t want to be
the sun.
those pink flowers by the river
after the Anglo-Saxon riddles
there are
these flowers
I don’t know for with
their names desiring
and I don’t under floods
want to know it folds into
the gurgling forever and
riverside when the
thick stems voyage memories
laid aloud between old bed then
strings and young bank their
meandering up turned lover’s name
over god’s mother’s skirts we pray
lyre, river flows hide snails flat hands
whisper they don’t pool lakes
of the harp’s mind on palms’
harmony their fingers like looking
with flowers vein wide at beauty
softly rouged curved and your cheeks
on top like caught sunsets become
mouths open underneath drizzle rain
to taste a shadow or when I
the wind’s lying with cleaned hands
promise and dragonflies’ on family graves
the bees’ too heavy I don’t know
chamber sing to land on their names
our kin and their lips and I don’t
loosen kind so go without any want to know.
About the Author:
George Reiner is a poet, translator, and artist based between London and Birmingham. With Penny Burkett they have published ‘cruising for lavs’ that explored queer relations and experiences in Polari. He is a member of the Birmingham Hippodrome Young Poets and has published his queer break-up translations as part of South London Gallery’s Strange Perfume Queer Book Fair. He is currently working on a short story in Italian, ‘Di-Ospitare,’ that explores hospitality in the modern world as part of a residency at CasaPiena MicroCentro in Petralia Soprana, Sicily.
