Robert Minhinnick's novel, 'Sea Holly' (Seren) was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize (2008) in the UK. Minhinnick has published eight volumes of poetry, the most recent being: Selected Poems ('99); 'After the Hurricane' ((2002); and 'King Driftwood' (2008) all from Carcanet. He has twice won the UK's Forward Prize for 'best individual poem' (1999, 2003). His latest book of poems is 'King Driftwood' (Carcanet). He lives in Porthcawl, Wales, and is an advisor to the charity 'Sustainable Wales'.

Purchase his books from Carcanet: After the Hurricaine, King Driftwood, Selected Poems and The Adulterer's Tongue.

Eavesdropping

4 a.m.
and the swifts
over the house in the disappearing
dark, the swifts open-mouthed, ten,
twenty of them, thirty swifts now
and in every open-mouthed swift I picture
a heart the size of a hawthorn berry,
blood red to bursting those swift hearts,
thirty hearts in thirty swifts
over the house this morning where I stand
naked at the window, listening to my own heart –
perhaps the closest I will get to prayer –
and eavesdropping on the silence of the morning
where every swift is a black new moon upon the black mosque of the air.

Paradise

Above me the sparrow
and above the sparrow

the shape of the hawk,
the sparrowhawk itself.

But how soon the sky is emptied of both
the sparrow and its terrorised song.

Yet one drop of blood
has fallen onto my hand

and I carry it gravely like a child
wanting a father’s word for some unworded thing,

evidence, surely evidence,
though of what he will now never say

and soon I am on the summit of the dune
and out on the ocean

I see the altars of rain
from which shapes of birds are rebounding

as if from a forcefield, black
sparks from the black

conflagration of rain coming my way
at such a speed the eye can hardly take it in

and now that black rain
is falling and the black shapes of birds,

sparrows and sparrowhawks, crying in their outrage,
and there’s lightning like the circuitry, botched,

modern, fed through a medieval mosque,
and how soon it is twisting around me, the storm’s black

jalabiyah, and the rain looking like
some ziggurat the dictator

demanded built, a black and empty
tower where the rain twists itself

in handfuls of black roots
ripped from this earth,

and the storm’s a perfect cylinder
contructed by the mechanics of the air

and I think surely if there are paradigms
of paradise they are found

within the storm’s anterooms,
lit now only

by the black light of its rose-window,
for now it’s a cathedral that’s passing overhead,

a supersonic corral
of prayer with the sound of choirs shouting their amazement

and the rain crackling like soldered rods
as if the stones on this summit

were still hot from their first configuration,
and then it is gone, growling into the north, gone from the dunes,

the storm headed north, 
and who were they, I wonder,

the man in the black coat with the child
in her black hood under his arm

who brushed past when I could not move
or even stand for rain

leaving me behind and my sky
and my skin and my voice gnawed white.