, Iceland

Quiet armour rising

Three poems

By Kenny Mah

Archives can be a dangerous place. Riffling through perforated pages, laced with silverfish kisses, can be a treacherous trail past more years than you might care to remember. Huginn and Muninn can be unkind birds; ravens are not known for their tenderness or tact.

Yet there is a thrill from recognising an old line once murmured, a sentiment lost to time and now resurrected. The dismay at purple prose (or in the three samples to follow, violet verse, alas) but also the surprise at your keener yet more forgiving eye.

Here are a trio of poems I dug up from the trenches of decades gone. I cringe rereading them, but with a wistful grin also.


I. Quiet

Nothing stirs
It’s oh so quiet
Quieter than the
Björk song I’m stealing
This line from
So quiet monks freeze
In their robes, their hands
Are stone
Statue-silent.

Still
It’s not still
Inside our heads
A maelstrom
A tornado
A discotheque
Chaos instead.

Slowly
We take longer breaths
Breathe deeply
We slow down
Quiet our minds
Quiet our hearts
Quiet, slowly
Quiet.

II. Armour

Castles in the clouds
And houses built by little pigs
Are meant to be blown apart.
Tear them down.
Still
You are wearing armour.
They don’t see it
How strong
You really are.

III. Rising

Light streams
Through the windows.
Early morning,
A different city.
I’m escaping
The same dream
Over and over.
One day, I tell you,
I shall be rising
And not dream
This same dream
Still.

It occurs to me that these are lines about stillness, and how much seismic activity can hide beneath our stillness. Or I am simply seeing what isn’t there. Hindsight is deceitful and merciful in equal measure.

Huginn and Muninn can be unkind birds, yet an unkindness of ravens is surely better than a murder of crows.

(None of you would believe this but I had forgot about the collective nouns for animals when I wrote the introduction; any atrocious wordplay here is a most marvellous accident. Lame puns are my happy place.)

Thought and memory, bad poetry and wistfulness. May we have more of these, always.