Challenger, Melanie

Last Rites

We all carry the dead
like a mother, the impacted gold
of the unborn and the perished,
perpetually journeying in the globe
of the body like tiny suns.

Every hour my woman's body sheds
or raises some old affinity,
as if each of those dense, luminous sponges
buries within it the potential
for renewal.

At once, all the faces of the dead,
shimmering at the river-mouth

of this globe, in suspense of being.
All the horrors of their deaths unremembered,
humming beelike with the urge to take flesh.
I understand the universe's desires for life
and death are carried inside me, I am humus;
they are gone to earth still clutching
the peculiar devotion of matter.

The Bath

I wear the day on my entire body
like a prayer-scarf, under the plush
baby-flesh of the fold, in the pit's
raw underclay, skin-quills and smog-
tufts trap the millions of this city,
the mid-threshing children of Pompeii,
as my knee's napped flag bears
in its downward wing the silt
of yesterday's jeans, and my toes'
abandoned cribs are the surrogate-dens
of graphite-dust, alluvia, grass-hairs.

This and me, me as the alloy
of meat and star-smelt, glide
into the bath's almost blue, freeing
a slick of the universe's wizardy stuff.
And from such crack and wrench
come those thick shimmery silkthreads
of matter, blood's putty, with murex-knots
of life-givingness like flies in amber,
moving slowly and stately as deepsea
jellyfish, all my prodigals beginning
their leaving of me.

 

About Melanie Challenger

 

Melanie Challenger is a librettist and writer. Her libretto of the Anne Frank diaries was televised on BBC 2 in January 2005. She is the co-author of Stolen Voices to be published in 2006, and she is currently working on an anthology of poetry for Bloomsbury and a second work of non-fiction. She graduated from Oxford University in 2000, and she has recently been awarded an Eric Gregory award for her poetry.