by Myronn Hardy

In the dream    there
were cherry blossoms.
We were naked.

The sun was scenic.
You described its beams as
transparent silos of pure

compassion    if not love    never
humanly realized    understood.
We stood.

I took your
palm.    Walked.    Asked
if we could enter    if we

had might enough to
feel? To become
what has never

become    never
here    never there?
This is a question of might.

by Myronn Hardy

What can I say of mercy?
Froth along the shore pleading
to be the shore. Let me sink

into you    my minerals yours.
Let me know if I’m possible
this way. Oh    impossible    this

is where I live.     I’m the monarch
waiting to give this up.
To live in a makeshift topography    just

ask.    Your question
doors      windows unsealed.
What is this verve?

Shall we walk?  Push through
like wild air?   Push through
as if we’ve known nothing else?

by David Constantine

Climbers without a leg-up in infancy
Would be crawlers life-long, getting nowhere and thinking
This is not what I’m here for. Mostly and best it’s a tree

That willingly or not, pleased or affronted, plays host. Once got going
Nothing much will halt a climber. Lightning perhaps
Or a chain-saw clearance but even in a fair-to-middling season

Symbiosis clicks. Nothing so very much wrong with this
Says the tree. I’d be nothing and nowhere without you, says the climber.
Deep down everyone wants to be loved, wants to be useful

And come spring, come summer and autumn, you may see a biped
A solitary promeneur stopped in his tracks by the fact
Of a fruiting wild apple tree climbed to the crown by roses

By deep-red roses, a weaving into the dark and out again
Into sunlight, into the sparkling aftermath of heavy rain. Yes , says the apple
To this new pal, the rose, they’re almost likeable, that sort at least,

When we enter through their eyes and for a while they suspend
Their normal thinking (so stunted, so frightened, so without much hope)
And gaze upon you and me. Yes, says the deep red rose amicably

To her helpmeet and his light green apples swelling in dark foliage,
They’ll do for once. They have lifted up their eyes to what is fit to be looked at:
Us, that is, me and you, sewn together with living beauty.

by David Constantine

Perhaps soon after they started courting, or more likely
When he got sent with the Pioneer Corps to the Mile End Road
My mother had her fortune told by a gypsy on Cross Lane Market.
Sit down there, love, this gypsy said, and stay quiet while I have a good
Long look into my crystal ball and say what’s what.

My mother went home smiling and told her best friend Elsie
What this fortune-teller, never taking her eyes off the crystal ball, had said.
She said: ‘I see a hanka an a hanka means ope.’

Ope he’d not get buried alive on the Mile End Road.
Ope he’d come home safe and sound when they sent him to India.
Ope her firstborn wouldn’t die like her sister’s one and only had.
Lots of opes there were our way: Ope Church, Ope Ospital for two.
And the hanka? Kept house and home steady even in the worst of times.
Love was the hanka from love-at-first-sight till her outliving him.

And being very lost and going right back to the dance they met at
Did I ever tell you how we met? she would ask, looking round us at the table.
Never before nor since did I hear a story so well hanka’d.