Peter Cowlam: 3 Poems

Peter Cowlam

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Cultivations

Things over here are only intimations,
flickers, non-lucent, light as obfuscation,
detail vanishing in air.

The gardens do not deserve the fate we have
designated, emptied of the beings who made
them. They have gone. Their flora I cannot name,
and no one is called back, not from the two-lane
rutted tracks repeating into the distance.

Strange ornamentation signals it is night.
A black moon rises, of a type I have not
seen before, its sky washed with vermilion,
and flown all round with bits of robotic
detritus. That must have meant an industry.

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Wind Has Changed

Mislaid, my newly packeted alphabet,
when we had lost control of our library.
Seeds arranged in bookish definitions cast
on a gardened world outside
are rogue, a lettered terrain of misspelt weeds.

Perennials last read for were a lot more
cultivated than in the reclamation
soil all are now grounded and serve sentence in.

I’ll admit before I’m accused, I had lost
my shadow also, inside and out, the part
of me, of speech and of being, who had searched
worded aisles and colour-ranked parterres, and knew
the potential bloom of every planting made.

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The Adoration of Belonging

That fifth rider riding roughshod had threatened
better things. We had got not to know ourselves
as ‘sole’, through a malignant social science
and its mandalas of group identity—
humanity’s dynamic
only a stasis as yet undiscovered.

It explained deference to authority
figures, with all indelible decisions
watermarked to them. Is not the answer then
lost in the adoration of belonging,
with a restart for history, its hidden
reset deferred in us all? We are words, words,
built to a discredited office survey.

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Peter Cowlam is a poet and novelist. As a novelist, he has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which sits at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. The Quagga Prize is awarded for independently published works of fiction. His other work has appeared in The Battersea Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Blue Nib, The Galway Review, Easy Street, Literary Matters, Eunoia Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, The Liberal, and others.