Jan Peters

Nightingales

Near-dawn nemeses,
Nightingales haunt trough and lull between
Cortisol spikes and death-stalked and choked
Snorting at the body’s chilled nadir of

Sleep. The male bird plots the breath-and-pulse
Motions - now erratic, now critical - as he gurgles
Whistles, trills his crescendo of lewd vehemence.

The female’s song: hot-pincered, torn
Tongue that writhes, twitches on the ground,
Soundlessly shaping curses at her defiler.

Philomela’s hushed sobs, silent indictments now
Keenly perceived by the vigilant third ears of those
Afflicted ones - traumatized, grief-stricken, depressed,

Anxious, contrite or guilty -
Jolted awake in cold-sweated, crippled terror:
Lame, mute, gasping, torso pinned under a dead weight.

Limbs thrash, vocal cords muster wild shrieks as the prone
Body unfreezes. Frantic, deafening music, humming or

Hiss of static accompany the assault:
Rape passed off as some random incubus mischief.
Later, Philomela’s glee and horror at the

Revenge she metes out to her assailant –
Coupled with her shame, anguish, self-hate,
Disgust, and bewilderment at

Violation - lend her song that odd, sublime depth,
So intriguing to poets. Some, but not all, have
Misplaced, displaced, misconstrued

This song. Coleridge, in
Thrall to some best-of-all-worlds,
Pollyanna glitch in his philosophy, once
Mistook the male’s song for hers - scorning
Philomela’s melancholy.

Keats received her as minstrel-messenger from that
Unknown Country, and rightly answered his own pained

Riddle with a verse of exquisitely crafted
Confusion.

T.S. Eliot honoured her rage, her sorrow - the defilement

Echoed in bawdy Elizabethan ditties
Washed up on Thames-side beaches, strewn among heaps of
Broken images that betoken a spent, despoiled land.

Later, gripped by midlife
Terror of Death, a poet lies
Awake, night after night, in the
“Soundless dark” on the cusp of dawn.

Then, at Philomela’s soundless prompting,
Works, night after night, to complete his last
Aubade -         

Falls silent.                                         



Quote from Philip Larkin, “Aubade”, Collected Poems, 1988

Saint Hubert’s Key

Mad with grief at his young wife’s birth-panged
Death, he takes to the woods. As keening hermit, he
Gives himself freely to the chase.

One day, a startling, regal
Hart crosses his path, crosses his sights:
Head turned, gaze fixed with Holy Rood illumined,
Afloat amid the antlers.

Patron of Woodsmen - Patron of Smithies -
Worshipped as Fount of Good Conduct on the Hunt –
Saint Hubert exhorts quick, clean kills; to shoot only
Old stags past their prime; to spare
Does with young in tow; to forfeit trophies with
Merciful bolts to sick, woebegone
Beasts met along the way.

Bright-minded one,
Keen-witted one - name nimbus-edged with the
Light of sense and conscience – he invests
Nail, cone, and cross with the sacramental might of a
Key that keeps Man corralled from Varmint.

Key laid amid hot coals to cauterize bites.
Skin of Man, Hide of Hound branded to
Shield them from the Mad Rage:

Rage of Caliban at face seen,
Unseen in pier glass, spyglass.

Rage of death-tiding froth – that
Throat-tight anguished agony
Taking fright at water.
Howl and snarl of Mad Dog -
Spit and scratch of Mad Cat -
What maketh Man ebbs away in

Eye-twitch, brain-twitch, heart-twitch
Gasps and spasms.







Saint Hubert’s Mass

I
Enlightened-Despot worthy fashions
Hermitage hewn not from light, but from a
Rare-sandstone outcrop on the
Harz-edged Hainberg Ridge.

Nestled in a dell beneath his hunting lodge:
Hallowed solitude of the hunter, woodsman, hawker -
Solitudo Sola Beatitudo. There, a

Relief depicts the bewigged milord as
Hubert knelt in wonder at the cross-borne-antlered beast.
Relief commissioned to honour an
Enlightened-Despot Bishop on his visit one
November to say the Saint’s Day Mass; to

Bless the hunt
Bless the hounds
Bless the horses
Bless the stalkers.

II
Odd crook of Hakenkreuz amid antlers
Blazoned in a torchlit procession.

Quarry doped to girth the swollen grandeur of
Poor-shot Göring, Jägermeister of the Reich.

III
That last Feast of Saint Hubert, just days before the
Pogroms begin.

The Key:
Arm rubbed with smirched alcohol -
Inkwell-steeped, needle-punched serial number.

The Code:
Quick kills for old, sick, wounded -
Doe and fawn, ill-bred-in-bone -
Woebegone.




Fontanelle

Feather-fingered
Psychopomp who
Bears souls to New Jerusalem
Laser-gouges a
Disc of skull from the
Bishop’s crown.

His
Blood-buoyed cortex
Throbbing beneath its
Viscous membrane - a

Tight-wound force
Coils up his spine through the
Breached fontanelle,
Fusing as cool breeze with the
Celestial wellspring.

Bones borrowed by
One who claims no
Earthly relics - his
Head is found in an
Avranches casket with
Telltale scars of soft-spot
Trepanation performed
While still alive.

 

Jan Peters is a British-born author currently residing in Germany. He has designed and taught a number of courses on poetry, creative nonfiction, and cultural studies during his time as a lecturer and researcher at universities in France, Germany and the United States. His work has appeared in Thin Skin, Ranger Magazine, Wildfire Words, The Starbeck Orion and Sixty Odd Poets.