And there on the coast like a Chinese lantern hung the sun. Whatever you do, you should not let them pour off the half-island To mix with the birds and the silts, said the wise woman. For there they will become us — body of our body Blood of our blood. And theirs and our flesh will hang On bushes, like the undershirt of Midas. Dead throats Will shirk in the sedge like spiderwebs, whispering Of how the victors took pliers to teeth and chopped charms out. No one left to remember the women, but they were deer Fleet and hunted, springing sideways, stunned by a fist. And when the sun rises, it will seem to our ancestors that a new race Has come up out of the sea, dripping with gold, crueller than the last.
Sasha Dugdale’s third collection of poetry, Red House, is haunted by ghosts, old presences that we may catch sight of from the corner of an eye, and nowhere more so than in this opening poem, whose quiet, delicate violence evokes both a modern place — Maldon on the Essex coast — and the incomplete Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon, written about a brutal Viking raid in 991 AD.
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
