Lesley Saunders
Lesley’s publications include Christina the Astonishing, with Jane Draycott (Two Rivers Press, 1998);
Her Leafy Eye, with Geoff Carr (Two Rivers Press, 2009); No Doves (Mulfran Press
2010); and Some Languages Are Hard to Dream In, with images by Christopher Hedley-Dent
(Mulfran Press 2010). Lesley has won many awards, including joint first prize in the 2008 Manchester Poetry
competition. Her new collection, Cloud Camera is due from Two Rivers Press in the summer of 2012.
"No Doves is a quite dazzling collection... She shares with fine poets like Jane Draycott and Charles Tomlinson an incredibly clear-eyed perception in language which is as musical as it is exact. ” David Morley
Grace
For what you are about to receive is something broken
that needs no mending: the daily loaves of give and take,
the elementary etiquette of harvest and its common wealth.
For what you are about to walk through is a portal
that needs no password, a door you found already open,
an arch joined at the fingertips or your face lit by a rainbow.
For what you are about to learn by heart is a library
that needs no deciphering, its leaves shining with questions
like a great feast laid out for you on the high table of summer.
Yet in some future winter carved of wood and stone and sky,
in the quiet refectory of its evening, every windowpane a wall
of dark and the garden still as glass, you may find yourself
toasting the old hunter-gatherers, how once they were encased
bone by bone here: praise-singers, full of strangeness, grace.
Commissioned for the opening of the new building and dining hall – which used to house part
of the Pitt-Rivers ethnological collection – at Kellogg College, Oxford, summer 2009.
© Lesley Saunders