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Iris Anne Lewis
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the poet
Born in the Rhondda in Wales, Iris Anne Lewis is a featured writer on fellow countryman Matthew M C Smith's Black Bough Poetry website. She was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2022, having previously won first prize in The Gloucestershire Poetry Society's 2020 Open Poetry Competition. Iris is a regular at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where she's so far been invited to read seven times. In 2018, she founded Wordbrew: a group of poets based in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds market town of Cirencester.
the poems
I make myself a skirt
of fish skin
Mother stitches mackerel eyes
as sequins to my bodice. They wink
dark gold in the sun.
My sisters leave their baskets
brimming full of gutted herring.
They braid my hair with seaweed.
Grandmother binds my thighs together,
strokes my silver scales. Her hands
are rough with barnacles.
Trawler men sing shanties of storm-
tossed ships and foundered boats.
There is salt in their voices.
Women lead me to the water’s edge,
show me how to dance to the surge
and suck of the waves.
They break in a bridal froth
of foam. Spindrift settles
as confetti on my shoulders.
I flip my tail,
rip through the tide,
dive deep in the ocean.
Claim the sea as my own.
I shall have to be
punished for writing this
After John Wieners'
Children of the working class
I do not want to write in colour,
red, purple, yellow, blue –
those shades of blood and bruises.
I do not want to write in orange –
that haunted hue of halloween.
I must be bold, plain-speaking;
tell of prisons, beatings, blistered skin.
And so I write in black.
The blank screen glimmers
mirror-bright. I start to type.
Words, those ghosts of thoughts,
unfurl across the page.
I highlight all my text,
change the font to white.
The Tomb of the Eagles
Like a trow, he just appeared,
led me through the coastal heath,
the bladed grass sharp
against my sandalled feet.
The air is restless here, he said,
a harshness always in its breath.
His voice a lilting burr
of Nordic vowels and rolling ‘r’s.
He tells me stories
of island ceilidhs, treeless landscapes,
a cache of bones and talons
of white-tailed eagles,
that sailed the Orkney skies
four thousand years ago.
We reach the cliff – the drop below, precipitous.
The sea glints silver cold.
Wild flowers flicker
in the coarse green sedge.
And then we are upon it –
the grass-topped tomb.
Its drystone walls curve round,
form a shallow entrance.
Lie down, he said. Use this –
two planks side-by-side
slung low on nine-inch wheels.
And through the long dark tunnel
I belly-skated five thousand years
to the pitch-black chamber of the cairn.
Stand up, he said. Flicked on his torch.
A row of human skulls grinned up at me.
He chuckled at my shock.
The skulls kept on beaming.
Publishing credits
I make myself a skirt of fish skin: Seaborne Magazine (Issue 3)
I shall have to be punished for writing this: Fresh Air Poetry (June 2019)
The Tomb of the Eagles: exclusive first publication by iamb