They live by a forlorn sea.

(They said: Here’s a magic carpet,

Come on this,

And when you arrive

We will give you a big kiss.)

I play in the palace garden,

I climb the sycamore tree,

Sometimes I swim

In the forlorn sea.

The King and the Princess are shadowy,

Yet beautiful,

They are waiting on by white cats,

Who are dutiful.

It is like a dream

When they kiss and cuddle me,

But I like it, I like it,

I do not wish to break free.

So I eat all they give me

Because I have read

If you eat fairy food

You will never wake up in your own bed,

But will go on living,

As has happened to me,

Far, far away

By a forlorn sea.

Stevie Smith

The Celestial Announcer

On the day that you hear

the station announcer

call out the towns and villages

of your life, as if she’d read

the very chapters of your soul,

that knowing way she has of saying Halifax,

the way she skirts around poor rainy Manchester,

and jumps to the conclusion now of Luddenden

– with its ghost of a station

and dream of Branwell drunk under the stars –

and all the big and little places

you have ever been, would like to go,

chanted, charted;

well, then you realise it’s time to change

your mind, ticket, journey,

point of departure,

Estimated Time of Arrival

and know that she will lend you wings

for those golden slippers, milk and honey,

bread, roses and a brand new map.

Maura Dooley

The Levitation of St Christina

(reputed by witnesses to have flown like a bird from her coffin during her own requiem mass – Saint-Truiden, Flanders, 1182)

I rise on a wing and a prayer. In the aisles Father Thomas

is singing his heart out O Lamb of God all shaven and shorn

and loud enough to waken the dead. Have mercy upon us.

Up here in the gods where anything goes I am Lucifer, born

like a swan from a box, striking the light and standing well clear

of the tears, of the tar and the feathers, and of the coffin’s yawn

that takest away Father Thomas’s face, that waning moon in the filthy air,

that gaping wound in the side of the world. And the O in his mouth

is the sins, is enough to make the angels weep. Receive our prayer.

Out of the hive of the yet to be born, I’m the queen bee, behemoth

in the candle’s flame, shifting my shape in the smoke dance,

the dance of death, whose sting is the needle fixed on celestial north.

I leap, and my shadow’s a shroud-span over the mountains, an icy stroke

down the cheek of the earth. I have only to touch the hills and they shall smoke.

Jane Draycott

Ego Tripping (There May Be a Reason Why)

I was born in the congo

I walked to the fertile crescent and built

the sphinx