Gaia
Lesley Saunders
is the name we gave to this:
how we painted our walls
with rivers and flotillas,
gazelles and gatherers
of saffron, how we bathed
in their frescoed beauty,
how we ached with pleasure.
Now, like all our dwellings,
the villas with mosaic floors
set among apricot orchards,
the herders’ huts and dovecots,
I have breathed fire and coals,
my cellars stare at birdless sky,
my hearth rests on the seabed
where only strangeness survives –
wreckfish stripping the bones
of drowned whales, old gods
open-eyed in their vast sleep.
Bio-note
UK based Lesley Saunders is the author of several poetry collections, most recently This Thing of Blood & Love (Two Rivers Press 2022) and, with Rebecca Swainston, Days of Wonder (Hippocrates Press 2021), a poetic record of the first year of the Covid pandemic. Her award-winning translations of Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta were published as Point of Honour (Two Rivers Press, 2019); and her translations of the poetry of Maria Azenha and Luís Quintais have appeared in international journals. With the support of colleagues at Lisbon University, Lesley is currently working on s series of papers on the connectivity between poetry and dementia.