One more poem from the first Proost Poetry collection, ‘Learning to Love’. This one is by Paul Grant, whom I have never met, but love his writing. This one does that wonderful thing of making the ordinary transcendent. Forgive me that it look backwards into the winter, but it is worth the regression.
Prodigal, by Paul Grant
And morning comes in an undertakers coat
A blackbird's bright notes
Tap December's blindness.
The harlequin tablecloth is a map of unrest:
A fagged ashtray piles north
And south's ruby sediment stains a glass,
West is a drained bottle of port,
East keeps vigil over black leather texts.
I am pressed flowers
Between a skim of days
Sick with the pottage of tried and tired happiness.
Outside
A silver bloom
Of glitter frost
Is sharp and hard as holiness.
I climb the back road
To find you in the dark.
Gravestones. Stillness.
Snow underfoot.
The depth of presence
Revealed
And sovereign silence stirs
In a heart
Hushed by beauty
Born, to bring us home.
