OF HOME AND HEARTH

On Ghosts Behind the Door by Mig Holder and Tim Dowley

This sequence of brief poems flash and flame
As if they were mind and heart photos. Yet they also burn
As Tim Dowley and his sister Mig Holder rouse

As well as rear homily, through birth times
And end times while sitting inbetween
Heaven’s patience. As above, it hosts houses

For the spirits within family.

Alternating through verse. Smooth words
Make much magic

From Holder’s 1941 snapshot to Dowling’s
‘laid in a drawer’  as God’s gift; as if each poem
Set were a kiss from a detached

But devoted admirer, noting black bibles
Or feeding through a fence, sugar
‘ to a steaming deer,’ each observation enraptures.

Allowing at once for the freedom you feel
When all senses enable both promise and charge
As hope lifts, and a homing piano is found.

Dowling ‘probes under notes’  hearing shelter,
While Holder talks of children’s games
And ‘a heavenly quilt that smelt of slight taboo
and unbrushed morning teeth’  We align

To the poetry of the past,
From a knitted dress to a sweaty Aertex shirt,
And the presence of things both under

The bed and beyond us, as at the end
Of their street we taste time.
With each poem primed as a gift.

If not from God, or It, then from
Grounding. As we stomp with them
Through the ruins to stamp and savour

The shadow and homely starch
Of bloodlines. Chasing ‘the fleeting cat-ghosts’
And the girl spotting trains

With her brother; From Fingal’s Cave,
Record players, Beethoven 5, staves
And waves, back to Malory Towers

And on to a glimpse of their midnight Mum
Beside fire; from a front room fried egg Jesus
To a puppet show Santa with ‘his fingertips 

forming steeples’, a world most have lost
Is soon saved. This is a slim but beautiful book.
Containing several prize winners. Smooth,

To the touch, its glossed paper makes it
A magazine for far journeys,
From a starlet’s bust to new earth;

A brochure that can blaze as only words will
When tested, which is always the point
Of short poems, as after reading,

There is a sequel in silence
As it starts to quantify their full worth.

Under the sky’s Masquerade

And the spurning on shelves, shorn
By Jesus, these prayer-like pieces,
These breaks in belief, locate God,

Not in His, Her or It’s grand respect,
But in that part of the heart no rhyme ruins.
We are safe with these poet partners,

As every step and sound shapes a treasure
To be sourced on the path past Saints trod.
Dowley and Holder contain so much saint,

Suburban sourced, through their writing.
That their poems wing-flick transgression
And swish across miracles. Of both faith

And regret, as they prize
In the concluding poem,
Their ‘ hovering, unquiet homeless parents.’  

They look behind each door
To gain ghosts from the slow drift
Of stars, scent and angels.

In this way, the unearthly
Bestows light and leeway
On what was once physical.

Our pasts remain pure as soon
As we assign them such detail.
At your touch then, this handbook

Sweetly becomes Biblical.

                                     David Erdos 6/3/25  

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