Issue 2: August 2003

Martyn Crucefix | Katy Evans-Bush | Alan Jenkins | Tim Turnbull | Julian Turner

JULIAN TURNER

Diabetes Today

I leaf through its latest issue as I wait
to be weighed, for eye tests, blood tests, urine samples,
low in the league table of hospital smells.
There's nothing lethal in my case to date

just warnings: "smoking multiplies the risks;
your retina deteriorates; your feet
have lost their reflex — that's bad; I can treat
your illness but the odds are one in six

you'll reach retirement while you're still alive".
Steve Redgrave, Gary Mabbutt are its heroes —
their stories seed beds where the message grows
that diabetics can live normal lives.

I've bitten through my tongue; come round at five
in piss-cold sheets; dislocated a hip;
crawled across filthy floors to split my lip
on toilet seats; been sightless when I drive.

I sit in waiting rooms and idly flick
through the small ads of our insignia:
insulin pens, white spirit, sharps, bizarre
chocolates, the nightmare of the ribbed sock.

The Seal People

I had watched them far off in the rough skerries,
their long cries carried to land on spindrift,
their bodies slipping like soap between the white
knuckles of waves, vanishing in the spray
for dives of joy into the great grey acres.

It was luck itself to find them there that day —
their visits rare and those who saw them blessed.
Alone, as the sun glared briefly over Heskair
making them dark as dolphins, I waited there
on the machair until they came ashore. Then

they skinned themselves assuming human shape,
their seal-natures pulled up on the sand
like boats beyond the breakers' reach and roar
and built a beacon out of tidewrack where
they cooked the fish they carried in their tails.

I only know that they were beautiful,
their foreheads spangled with salt, their eyes like pairs
of moons, their bodies glistening like gods'.
They looked at me, their faces filled with distance,
the scope of journeys sketched in their high cheeks.

A shiver takes you when your soul is moved.
That night I shook myself to somewhere else.
They showed me how to talk with just my hands;
how I could leave my body like a pelt
on the cold sand and watch it from above;

how they had swum the margins of the world
trailing their fingers in the edgy sea
as if they drew a human envelope
in water, reaching out around us with
a hand to mark the limits of our kind.

They came from where the ice and water meet:
I saw the islands long untenanted,
the far, stark dwellings they had left behind
for the dark, forgetting ocean, with its freedom.
They clothed themselves again at break of day,

departing from our world on the high crests
of surf, their arms describing arcs of spray,
their laughter tumbling back on skeins of wind
to where I watched, diminishing. Their name
meant "us" as all the names of peoples do.

These poems are taken from Julian Turner's first book, Crossing the Outskirts (Anvil, 2002)