• Lesley Saunders

CHERISHABLES

Relics are material remains of saints which are venerated as signs of their continued presence in the world – The Oxford Companion to the Body

 

Nail parings, hairs caught

in a comb, a scurf of shed skin,

a shoe-strap or milk-tooth —

 

these are the room’s inhabitants,

and the sound of a fast river

running somewhere under the house

 

like smoke passing unnoticed

over the speckled surface of a mirror,

or the breathless cry of a child.

 

 

 

 

HARE-DOG

Romano-British brooch in the form of a hound (?)

 

Hedging and ditching

the length of the Ridgeway,

hiding and seeking

between ghosts of elm,

 

a quicksilver self — haring

and hounded — runs

in its slumber

through the old wilds

 

of our dreaming, a wane

of moon in its eye. Two shakes

of a tail before the kill

it’ll waken, the lickety-split of it

 

caught in dawn’s headlight,

pinned in mid-chase,

barely more than a glimmering;

some trickery out there in the mist.