After Hearing MacGillivray Read Her Poems in May

 

Ventriloquist of the Nine Waves around Beltane

custodian of late modernism Celtic folklore

those esoteric hoards let me defer to your

aural enchantment exhale once more &

immerse myself in your trobairitz pneuma

as you inflect your structure-of-rime’s rupture

Yours: the psalter which tintinnabulates Kore’s

passage as she descends only to resurrect again

where your polysyllabic-matrilinear-Highland

name resonates above all quotidian white-noise

So interleave the Ogham alphabet-of-trees

atomise Persephone’s fleshed-out liturgy

shaman-priestess oracular orate

In the stillness I hear your blent susurrus

imbricate sibilance’s agalma set-apart superb

 

Beyond the nemeton the copse the grove-

lacking-an-altar is your graven cartouche

Dance-of-the-intelligence transmutes

into melopoeia’s Gaelic lilt peeling away

pine-layers to mint Sibylline leaves

which are now precociously strewn

Yours the inscriptio inluminatio

longing to syncopate my new katabasis

What chthonic stirrings? Whose breath-turn?

 

What chthonic stirrings? Whose voice calls?

Exhalation emits fricatives to enact a feather

on the breath of the White Goddess at Yule

Most yammer & stall upon upholstered

thresholds where Covent Garden’s flush

tourists amass of a mid-week evening

jockeying to populate convivial pubs . . .

As you dissolve into Beltane’s balm & dusk

I launch into another Samhain chat-room nekuia

 

(The Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden – 27/05/25)

 

 

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Mark Wilson

 

 

 

Mark Wilson has published five poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013), Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016) & Paolo & Francesca in a Colder Climate (Black Herald Press, 2025). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, Tears in the Fence, 3:AM Magazine, Anvil Tongue, International Times, The Fiend, Syncopation, Epignosis Quarterly, Mande, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Enheduanna, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.