WEST MALAYSIA

robert_james_berry@yahoo.com 

Savage Stones

On a winding road close to the coast
This ring of stones
Wet with sunshine
Marks a slaughtering place.

As I delve the burial site for relics
Evening settles like a spell.

A grey hood of smoke cauls
The summit crown
Where a sorcerous throng
Once conjured the dead.

Silence picks the spiky coronet of trees
Green with old bloodshed.

All round me
Tumuli bulge from the earth's belly
Like unborn children.

Tonight, I shall stand under foretelling stars
And unriddle the runes
On these moon-washed megaliths

The wind throwing my shadow
Across the stones like a bloodspill.

Battlefields

Rooks are scratching
The sky's darkening page

Writing over the soft skull
Of the moon.

Our tall cedars smoke with mist
Then smother in a black pool
Of darkness.

In the house
A stupefying silence stirs,
Lingering at winter windows
Which are like the last embers of eyes
Put out.

After the rains
We had a durable peace

But the past, raw with superlatives,
Giant with civil wars
Has defiled this place.

The evening is an open drawer of knives
Longing for bloodshed.

High Places

A ritual place
Where wind is torturing
The chapel's tin roof

And prayer flags are
Flapping like taffeta tongues
Torn from the land's weathered throat.

High on these plateaus
Where rain hurls curses

The icy silence of the stars
Grows silver as heaven.

Sandstorms deflower the dead here
Preserving their bodies' broken gourds,

For time to rifle over faces dry and solemn as old scriptures
Exhumed by the wind.

But still the living wear their unshakable faith
Brightly as the saffron robes of sunset.

For in this mist-laurelled land
The peaks are white as sainthood

The ice valleys are a command to devotion

And the great deitied rivers sing poetry
Deep with centuries of reverence.

Donegal

The centuries have printed their anger
On this coast.

The sea in a dirty rage
Drills at the rocks' knuckles

Headlands stagger under the crack of rollers

And the foulmouthed wind
Is throwing sand

Skinning the strand
Where sea wrack cowers
 From the wrath of surf.

The sky is a mad painter's mind
Where storm clouds burn like banked turf

Driving scuttling sea life and
Bailing fishermen to their shacks,

Men cold as the old geography
Of this weather wrecked land.

After the storm has spoken
There is a coarse twang of salt,
Dead fish, rock pools

And the tide muttering vengefully
As it scrubs the sand clean.

Looking out,
A long fingered isthmus of land
Barnacled as a whale's snout
Suns herself in the brief Atlantic light.   

© All Copyright, 2000, Dr. Robert James Berry.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.