Martin Ferguson was born in West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared, in among others, Ink Sweat and Tears, The Honest Ulsterman, The Poetry Village, The High Window, The Journal, International Times, Runcible Spoon, Kleksograph, Purple Patch and Stand (forthcoming). His first collection was shortlisted by Against the Grain Press and published in 2019 by Original Plus. He lives and works in France and was guest poet on Paris Spoken World Online, in July 2020.
A swim in the Marmara,
mingling souls
exchanging the breath of life
between continents
east and west entwine.
A medieval romance
to die for her kiss
her core at my lips;
seni opiyorum
sana asık oldum
hep seni düsünüyorum
sana ihtiyacım var
sensiz olamam …
A secular spell on the Bosphorus.
With our first we reach
equilibrium, seamless union,
each and every long kiss after
senses every other
then further …
the journey of the kiss continuum.
The liturgy of love
the ritual of unbroken meaning
familiar incarnations on the pebbles –
sepulchral statues of Salmacis
and Hermaphroditus.
Our hands cemented,
limbs engrafted
and our exiled hearts together
melted.
Habitual ports of friendship
beneath the cliffs of Henna.
Behinds us, the ochre haze of Byzantium.
The Call
How it gutted his heart to cinders,
to catch her so delirious,
disillusioned, in a land where he too grew
equal in trouble, in disaffection.
And she made that decision to live,
to lumber, in a town, a country,
with such seeming revived potential, only
stifled and flawed, by its barbaric revival.
For him to see his mixed cousined birth land,
from the blackened southern skirts of Europe,
diaphanous, through her shaky sorrow,
her faint Mediterranean vowels
so peripheral now, distant breaking,
their disenchanted expectation,
her solitary confusion.
He heard his first world again,
through her tears on the telephone.
Where to turn, where to pass,
lost in the chilling lottery of words,
the whirling debris of lives
on her initial, slow and drawn,
stretched out, concrete heavy week.
Her delicate optimism,
effortlessly shattered, abandoned,
from the over bearing predatory muddle
of articulating streets.
And missing.
Adrift amid a glacier
of foreign voices,
that sounded just like his.
Lecce
Poetry in this post: © Martin Ferguson
Published with the permission of Martin Ferguson