Shannon Clinton-Copeland is a London-born Ireland-raised Irish-Jamaican writer and poet living in Norwich, England. She has degrees in literature and creative writing from the University of East Anglia, where she is working on her PhD in early modern Irish literature. Her work has been published by Bandit Fiction, Leslie Magazine, The Rialto, Anthropocene and Acumen, and has been commissioned by the National Centre for Writing. She is fond of hyphens.
Brúid, or, Far Before the Present State
See be root and so the story softens
As the earth in rain—no strain of barbarism
Like Gerald and his cronies loved to say,
Instead there are only his green feet,
Toes languid in the moss bed and a head
Full of flower petal and lichen.
He is done with fighting, savagery
A distraction from his true passion:
The bog, the brush, the gorse, oh god—
The indescribability of the bracken,
Moorland downy and his body only slackens
Here, where the land can hold him
What beast, what barbarian?
Only Colum, maybe, if we had to name him,
The only maiming in his nature the scything
Of wildflowers for another brother’s grave.
How heavy it is to name blood, to spell
All roots with poison, to give language
Serrated edges like violence was ever
Indigenous to voices. How gentle the love,
How berry-sweet the skin, when it is not being
Blithely separated. How lovely,
To imagine all that greenness
Before the darker, unwashable colour seeped in.
The Fourth Law of Motion
When a chicken dies, his father takes it by the feet,
And flings it over the hedgerow
Into a neighbouring field. This begins
A war with the farmer—nasty things
Through letter boxes and threatening missives.
*
When the koi dies, my grandmother has it gutted,
Dried, and painted scarlet. She hangs it
In the garden. Within a week it is gone—
She decides the neighbour had it stolen.
She speaks badly of her every Sunday evening.
*
When I go to look for myself in the mirror as normal
And find instead that there is only empty voided space,
I seek a wall, high enough to have meaning,
Vault over, and stake my body—one limb
For each point of a star—across the green.
I wait for something to happen.
Learning the Sonnet
I.
As it is one of the oldest, strictest,
and most enduring poetic forms, it
seems only right there should be a sonnet
known as English. Intended to be read
Silently, it seems the sonnet does not
fulfil its purpose—there is no silent
English poetry. Often a problem
is presented, then given new perspec
tive. An English sonnet has three quatrains,
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, king, country
and parliament. There are strict require
ments. The voice bends the form to its own will
instead of obligingly succumbing
to the demands of outside influence.
II.
My abdomen is made up of many
Small horses. Whenever I am faced with
Situations of stress, they start running.
They are very tired. My body has
Become a pasture.
Sonnets have a set
Rhyme scheme. Lines are assigned letters A through
G. To write a real sonnet, you must be
Willing to change whole patterns of your speech.
To fit into the form, you must accept
The reality of losses.
In the Shakespearean sonnet, it is
The closing couplet which ties everything.
In this way, to decide to try to write a sonnet
Is something that is deeply unnatural.
III.
I can be good. I can shave whatever
Is necessary from my dialect,
I can sever any native tether
I will let go of what you’d least expect.
If the English sonnet is a curtsey,
I’ll never rise to my full height again.
Can I do more? Do you want all of me?
Yes sir, yes Empire, down goes the pen.
No liberties—form wants obedience.
Here in Bethany, I oil Sonnet’s feet.
This old bitch can put the ingredients
Of a new trick to work without deceit.
See? I knew I’d learn to write a sonnet.
It’s third time lucky.
The Galway Review 