Unknown Soldier

We have covered him with real flowers

and taken him from country to country.

It’s always the same journey –

people standing in the streets

silently saluting

as we carry him by.

And our hands tremble

under his weight,

our eyes are shocked

by the riddle of tongues

presenting the same paradox

in every country –

the whole human voice as background

shrilled to fever

about keeping the guns at bay.

Katherine Gallagher

Published in Carnival Edge, New & Selected Poems, (Arc Publications, 2010)

Girl on a Bolting Horse

The horse’s head forward, not surrendering,

the girl vertical in the stirrups

the black sky gathering steel.

Wind slicing the hair from her face,

the dark curve of herself going faster —

the blur of her brothers, standing transfixed;

she, holding her breath, bone-afraid

and flying . . .

© Katherine Gallagher

(from Circus-Apprentice, Arc Publications,  2006)

​

Question

Would you like

                         to say Hi

​​​                                      to a beetle?

A beetle would

                          like to say Hi

                                         ​to you. . .

by Katherine Gallagher

Dinosaurs’ Breakfast Special

Urns of slime

and reptiles’ heads,

giants’ feet

and mouldy breads.

Icy hearts

and mountain eggs,

a ton of tongues

and turtle-legs.

Frogs and beetles

chewed to gristle,

old pine cones

and spicy thistle.

Snake-flesh paste

and baby whales,

slowly simmering

heads and tails.

Blackfish eyes

and stingray skin

mixed and mixed

till slimy thin.

All gulped down

with spidery glue

which sleepy dinosaurs

forget to chew. . . 

© Katherine Gallagher

Broomfield Park

A moorhen busies herself,

rocks this way and that

on a wave-washed nest.

Swans float in late afternoon chill,

shadows lengthen,

chestnut buds swell.

Forsythia trembles the breeze –

pastel-green willows barely move

dipping branch-tips into the lake.

Every year I wait for this –

first flowers, trees leafing

on sculpted branches,

reflecting in the water

their steadfast

cascades of green.

© Katherine Gallagher

A Girl’s Head

(after the poem, ‘A Boy’s Head’ by Miroslav Holub)

In it there is a dream

that was started

before she was born,

and there is a globe

with hemispheres

which shall be happy.

There is her own spacecraft,

a chosen dress

and pictures of her friends.

There are shining rings

and a maze of mirrors.

There is a diary

for surprise occasions.

There is a horse springing hooves

across the sky.

There is a sea

that tides and swells

and cannot be mapped.

There is untold hope

in that no equation exactly

fits a head.

Katherine Gallagher

From Poetry Street 3 (Sale & Orme, 1991),