Ruth Taaffe

Singapore

 

Ruth Taaffe is from Manchester, UK, and currently lives and works in Singapore as an English teacher. She is studying for a Masters degree in Creative Writing with Lancaster University. Some of her poems have been published in the online journals Creative Writing Ink, The Poetry Village, Allegro and in print in Acumen and Poetry Birmingham.

Two Poems    Uncertain Times  -   Staying Put

 

Poem  written: 25th May 2020

 

Uncertain Times

 

‘And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity’

 

-John Donne ‘To His Coy Mistress’

 

In my son’s bedroom

piled clothes rack hangs silently 

folded dark moth wings

 

Blurry edged mirror

a pond frozen in stasis

fingerprinted glass

 

Ridge of white mountains

piled duvet of new terrain

lying untrespassed

 

Vagrant backpack hunched

near the door in the corner

dumped six weeks before

 

Empty food bowl holds

fork perched on the precipice

searching for its tune

 

Dry plant leans its leaves

to glass for the bigger light

outside life beckons

 

Curtains like water

closed to the world, knowing no

other way to fall

 

 

 

Date poem was written: 9^th May 2020

 

 

Staying Put

 

It was the place at Christmas where the tape

was stuck where you rested the pieces

against the lip of the desk snipped almost

incredibly uniform in size. I wrapped

paper around Lego sets, nipped each slice

quickly to stop it closing on itself inept.

There is a shape left around the square

of nothing, an edge of tacky black fuzz.

In it the memory of all our sleeves

resting at the desk since December.

Why did nothing stick in the middle

of this record of lint and fluff reminding us

of how life stays put and is always enough?