Matthew Stewart: Featured Poet

 

 

 

 

01252 722698

You worked your way round my milk teeth,
sung umpteen times before you stuck.
Soon a chameleonic code,
you were my safeguard from a snatch,
then my duty when staying out,
and recently a thankful leap
from trade fairs and dogged insects.
My fingers refuse to leave you.

 

 

 

Epilogue

for Josefa

 When you trace your wrinkles, criss-crossed
like the fine scars of unknown wounds,
and speculate how they got there;

when you’re sure you hid the stained scarf,
the note and the bent bronze bracelet
for some significant reason;

maybe you can’t remember what
you forgot, but you remember
you forgot, which is worse, far worse.

From: Inventing truth, HappenStance (2011)

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Matthew Stewart was born in Farnham, Surrey, in 1973. Following a comprehensive school education, he took a degree in modern languages at St Peter’s College, Oxford. He has lived in Extremadura, Spain, for the past fifteen years, where he works as the export manager and blender for a local winery. His poems have been widely published in UK magazines and he blogs at http://roguestrands.blogspot.com