Red Geraniums
Nothing beyond this truest of reds, nothing as I stop
on a murmuring mid-afternoon drawn to this bed of glow
illumined in optimum, singing light. Its petals are full and fragile
beside this strip of grass, cracking with ants, working their
scatty lines minutely under a mighty sky with its whirr and prickle
of insects, which scrawl out their strange, invisible, codes in heat.
Crimson fountains, as fresh as nosebleeds, thrust out from
lustrous stems as yet, unbroken, uncut, and somewhere, through,
out and over the gleaming-green hedge, traffic disturbs air on the
dusty road and a lorry’s thunder signals difference — I think of all
the ways and the centres that multiply along this road. Simultaneously,
I stand in each garden and each lot, talking to strangers
about the state of the road and the weather and the government
and the rising cost of living and holidays other selves did not reach.
I stand silently by the telegraph pole with an etched number
by who knows who and I sit on the junction box, edged with rust
kicking my heels and I am driving that lorry to the vanishing point,
somehow always homeward, while I stand looking at red geraniums,
thinking that there is nothing through or beyond this truest
of reds, nothing as I stop, illumined in optimum, singing light.
Matthew M. C. Smith is a poet from Swansea with work in Poetry Wales, Ink Sweat and Tears, Arachne Press, Finished Creatures and Broken Spine. In 2024, he read with Owen Sheers and Matthew Hollis. He is the author of The Keeper of Aeons, Origin: 21 Poems and Origin: 21 Poems. He edits Black Bough Poetry.
Twitter: @MatthewMCSmith Insta @MatthewMCSmithpoet Also on FB.
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