Wild Court

An international poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London

Two poems by Will Stone after Georg Trakl

 
 

    De Profundis

 

There is a pine forest on which an acid rain falls.
There is a tree of limbs that stands lonely here.
There is a nuclear wind that haunts abandoned new homes -
How criminal this century.

Past the darkening suburb
the dazed runaway still begs from a sleeping bag.
Red and pinched her eyes burn in the headlights
and her swollen womb awaits the backstreet quack.

Returning home
night watchmen found the surplus body
stiffened in a cardboard box.

A player, I am remote from sepulchral towers.
The anthrax of amen
I licked from the weeping wall.

On my brow mad lasers play.
Science seeks my heart.
There is a tongue in my mouth which is cut.

At night I found myself upon a runway
thick with screams and siren blasts.
Beneath the groaning bridge
brown rats have feasted once more.

 
 

    Grodek

 

At nightfall the suburbs incubate
with stealthy disease and welling rage,
the pale cul-de-sacs, above which more darkly
carves the moon, the night by-passes
bereaved women, the muffled scream
of their inoperable hearts.
But quietly there in the playground
famished childhood where no greed resides,
tears shed evaporate, ocean unconcerned.
Under stars unseen for the orange glow
the reaper rides the empty ring road,
to greet the ghosts passed on by tactful undertakers;
and softly the horn of future sounds
through the swaying jibs of dockyard cranes.
Oh unimpeded cycle! You boarded up altars,
today a terrible affliction upsets the inspired signal,
the womb blind yet unborn.

 
 


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