Molly Bloom 25
  • MOLLY BLOOM 25
  • -
  • Tony Beyer
  • Danielle Hooke Goodbody
  • Alex Josephy
  • Ian Davidson
  • Paul Rossiter
  • Caroline Clark
  • Kate Ashton
  • Iain Britton
  • Mandy Pannett
  • Patricia Farrell
  • Petra Vergunst
  • Tim Allen
  • Vik Shirley
  • Luke Emmett
  • Linda King
  • Kay Syrad
  • Richard Foreman
  • Molly Zoom (live readings)
  • Previously in Molly Bloom
  • Submissions
  • Editor
  • MOLLY BLOOM 25
  • -
  • Tony Beyer
  • Danielle Hooke Goodbody
  • Alex Josephy
  • Ian Davidson
  • Paul Rossiter
  • Caroline Clark
  • Kate Ashton
  • Iain Britton
  • Mandy Pannett
  • Patricia Farrell
  • Petra Vergunst
  • Tim Allen
  • Vik Shirley
  • Luke Emmett
  • Linda King
  • Kay Syrad
  • Richard Foreman
  • Molly Zoom (live readings)
  • Previously in Molly Bloom
  • Submissions
  • Editor
  Molly Bloom 25

Ian Davidson

I SAW IT ALL AND IT WAS MOVING
Buy land, they are not making any more. Mark Twain 
 
1. 
Many ways to come into land
 
Land revealed as layers patiently  
brushed aside or scoured by a storm 
from far at sea, 
 
the friction from little divils  
riding the waves.
 
2. 
Branches lift their toes and teeter,
otters follow leaving scent on an  
underwater track to a rocky mouth of 
broken teeth that gapes open 
at all angles, seawater washing 
foaming down the gullet past rocky ribs.  
 
3.  
The fallen angels gather round, 
broken rocks become teeth that 
become an impossible airway for 
an expanding globe where wings   
just begin to catch air, just begin 
to lift off the surface. 
 
The sea breathes as sand falls
to the seabed as a curtain,
islands loom closer then disappear,  
sand is covered then discovered, 
making land anywhere.
 
 
​

  
AS IF AGAIN
  
Sprinting to escape fate
and the biology that bugs.
Maybe freedom is not, as 
Blake may have said,  
  
inside you, but a  
collect call, a  
distant 
disembodied voice 
you have to pay  
for and lets you 
off the hook. 
 
Or freedom is  
found in the 
sound of a  
hummingbird,  
  
moving in and out  
of the hive of leaves  
we come to call book, 
looking for others lives
with the honey  
of the past dripping  
from fingers soiled  
on real parchment. 
 
This is not the knotted  
work of arms with  
rolled cuffs, sleeves  
to the elbows  
digging a trench 
or cutting warm peat  
or fixing the raspberry cage
with whatever comes to hand, 
 
but the double-sided fork tongued 
work like words on a page, telling 
the story as if plain fact, as if
anything can happen.


© Copyright Ian Davidson​ 2021

Ian Davidson was brought up in north Wales, where he also lived for much of his adult life. After some years in Newcastle-upon-Tyne he now lives between a smallholding in southwest Mayo in Ireland and Dublin, where he teaches in UCD. His most recent publications are From a Council House in Connacht (Oystercatcher 2021) and By Tiny Twisting Ways (Aquifer 2021). His Selected Poems will be published by Shearsman and a collection will by Red Squirrel Press in 2022. He has also published monographs, articles and essays on modern and contemporary poetry, the most recent being an extended consideration of the work of Bill Griffiths in the Blackwell Companion to British and Irish Contemporary Poetry and an essay on Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. You can see and hear him reading for Molly Bloom here.

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