Eveline Pye: Three Poems

Celestial Navigation

a three-dimensional universe
icosahedron
suspended from the ceiling

a surge of electricity
orange becomes yellow
casts a bright shadow

a tiger moth is drawn inside
this triangular world
sun bulb at its center

its chitin wings slowly singe
and it burns
in the bliss of incongruence

 

Three

If my garden of numbers
        grew in arithmetical series
                then beyond the lawn

would be geometric
        my pink pencil would fill
                space with paper roses

clematis would climb
        the lover's arch
                bounded by thistles

we would grow
        away then together
                graft each onto the other

thistle clematis rose
        assisted reproduction
                a child with three parents

 

The Law of Statistics

for Sally Clark 1964 – 2007

 

You, Sally Clark, solicitor,
discover your son, Christopher
dead in his Moses basket. Harry, born
a year later, dies in his bouncy chair.

Pediatrician for the Crown,
Sir Roy Meadow, tells the jury
two cot deaths in the same family
would occur only once in a century.

Odds are one in seventy-three million,
lower than the lottery, beyond all
reasonable doubt. An easy decision:
You must be guilty.

At Styal Prison, the horde screams,
Here's the nonce! Die woman, die!
They bang on the door, clamber up,
gawp as you cringe in a holding cell.

At the second appeal, your body
is free but your mind has crumpled.
You drink until you die,
your third son, left without a mother.

I tell this story to my medical students,
show death by natural causes
was more likely than murder.

Silence

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Art Information

• “A Touch of Yellow” © Elizabeth Konkel; used by permission.
• “Unfolded Icosahedrons” © dodeckahedron; Creative Commons license.