‘Sue Burge’s poems often blend known histories with emotional epiphanies. They are immediate and filmic, drawing the reader into small but complex worlds.’ … Tamar Yoseloff
‘widely travelled poems both culturally and historically, journeying deep into territories of collective memory and the individual psyche.’ … Heidi Williamson
‘Sue Burge has a passion for and deep knowledge of film. It is not surprising then, whatever the subject matter, to find her poems filled with sharp visual imagery. She is as at ease with an interrogating close-up as she is with a panning or crane shot. Her work has movement and surprise as well as contemplation and reflection. Her work is disturbing and rewarding in equal measure.’ … Maura Dooley
‘I deeply enjoy Sue’s cinematic landscapes, filled with crystalline images, her heartfelt honesty & humility, as well as her gift for linguistically-inventive lyricism.’
David Leo Sirois, Spoken World Online
Sue Burge is a seasoned chronicler serving her readers with bitter sweet paradoxical morning soups, throat scalding metaphoric crank, nerve- jamming and mind spinning metaphor spiced beverages. … Mbizo Chirasa (Time of the Poet Republic)
when i was a witch
i thought i could run underwater
when they pulled me out
they said i was smiling & my eyes
had bleached
from blue to jade
i wrote Ten Ways to Recognise a Witch
then looked in the mirror
when they found my list they pricked me
full of holes, held me down
until i became river-sister
nibbler of water-mint, holder of breath
a waterlily seeded in the sponge of my lungs
& i bloomed
with the genus Other
magic, it is said, can’t work in water
yet here i am drying on the bank
still whole, still smiling
when i was a witch i had a voice like hailstones
they put me in a sack
weighed it down with words
chose a good high bridge
i collaged the words into mini hexes
on the back of sweet-wrappers
oh purple oh orange oh shiny
when i was a witch i had a cat called Bert, wore my heart
on my wrists
when i was a witch i built a cairn of hagstones
on the strandline
luck bringers fairy binders
stone stone
with a hole
like a moan for the moon to sail through
they say if you put one to your ear
you will hear mer-speak
rings for my fingers, rings for my toes, breasts
full of amber, but still i float
when i was a witch i could play i spy
with my little eye all day
with you & you & you
i was the shaking board that said yes, said no
when i was a witch they poured the coldest water
from the highest ledge
& i burnt & burnt
but there was still witch left
(Commended in Mslexia 2023 Poetry Competition)
Yellowstone and what the bears mean
after Rebecca Solnit
i.
everyone has a bear story
great bear little bear dancing bear
the frisson of hurtling angersong
we have seen nine
three times Goldilock’s horde
I don’t want to get too close
sleep in their beds
spoon their food into my little mouth
I know what it’s like to be held by a predator’s gaze
ii.
I’ve walked London’s streets by night
keys threaded through fingers into spiky knuckleduster
pushed through pelted bipeds
territorialising every brick with their yeasty pee
iii.
and yet, I’m lucky
a hundred years before I would have been arrested
street woman no questions asked whatever my class
deflowered by an inspector surgeon’s tool
his surprised leer
oh you were a good girl after all
the shameful runnel of first blood
iv.
each step in this park is an act of resistance
a no to skirt corset heel
but this wilderness is not wilderness
it is path
it is trespass
v.
what worries me most is the area of Yellowstone
where the earth’s crust is thin as a fontanelle
vi.
the towns outside are wilder than the park
freight trains so long there’s time
at the crossing
to rewrite our history
grits on the menu –
and gunshops
vii.
I am seventeen walking back from a party
heels dress the bee’s knees
and he stops, says get in
and I say no
and he picks an airgun up from the back seat
and I run
knock on a door down a long path
ask an old man for help
he lets me sit on the doorstep
I fold myself small as a cigarette butt
until I stop crying and the road is empty
viii.
let the dust of my body
return to the damaged sky
let it say enough
(Commended in Mslexia 2022 Poetry Competition)
The trees are talking to themselves
sending messages about the sky
from canopy to root
flirting with sunlight
murmuring rain mantras
in all their dialects
the oaks swearing
at the cloudless sky
in flawless Anglo-Saxon
rough bark tattoos my calves
I have always been in love with silver birches
longing to fall into a Russian fairy-tale
feel snowflakes wet my eyelids
smell the pungent truth of wolves
today is brown and dry as late autumn
I crunch leaves underfoot
a child at play in August’s heat
a stumble of long roots
lichen dapples bark
like tarnished silver
a single note of birdsong
catches in high branches
(Winner of the Norfolk Prize, Café Writers Competition 2022)
Temple of Fame
Studley Royal Water Gardens
When they peeled the dome
from the damaged temple
it was full of honey, oozing
down the columns like candlewax
the workmen’s hands slathered
as if they were desperate bears
just out of hibernation;
legacy of the monastic bees
who’d swarmed in trees
since the Dissolution.
Imagine them one day
sliding under the dome
not caring about the fakery
of painted marble, hollow columns
the notion of fame;
doing a crazy little charleston
for their fellow bees:
Come, come, we have found a city.
(This poem appeared on The Friday Poem, 10 June 2022)
I am building Paris in my bedroom
First, I cut a string of paper dolls from a back-copy of Le Monde – such a city needs a population of a certain kind of girl. Here’s one who arrived in Paris for the first time, shiny, innocent, and left with je ne sais quoi and a fringe like Juliette Greco.
I am building Paris in my bedroom. From leftover lego I snap Notre Dame into higgledy shape, balance a flimsy girl on the Quai aux Fleurs. She easily answers the question Where were you when…? for she is always in Paris when someone famous dies. She will speak of the friend who died with unwritten dances still inside, how she sat in shock in her Bastille flat, brim with unwept tears.
In my dreams I’m lost in Montreuil’s labyrinthine murs á pêches, hands a mess of clawed juice, crushed kernel or I’m deep in the catacombs – conducting a pyramid of skulls grinning dusty harmonies to regretful songs.
I am building Paris in my bedroom. See, here’s the Eiffel Tower fashioned from a cat’s cradle lifted from my lover’s fingers in 1981. Today I plan to craft the silhouette of Sacré Coeur, tear off a wavering girl to place on the steps. She’s a girl who had a doll’s house but no idea of home; a girl who thinks she sees angels, bought a penny string of beads and named them rosary. A girl who looked for love in a scavenged prayerbook.
I am building Paris in my bedroom. Look, I’ll put a girl here on Pont St Michel cupping the silk of the Seine like a sacrament to fill her home with light, Gallic shrugs, the joyful lather of French soap, unexpected brioche crumbs between the sofa cushions. This girl knows she’s a cliché in her belted mac, angled beret, quick slick of rouge allure; some days she is noir to her soul – resistez, resistez! A girl can be too cool you know, instead of strutting the streets as if she belongs she should kiss the platform of the Gare du Nord, ecstatic, papal.
I am building Paris in my bedroom. Here are the chaotic market stalls of Barbès clustered under my bed. I fashion them the old way with matchsticks and twine, colour in polystyrene food with felt-tip pens. The trick is to not want to be somewhere else, not to crave the cracked skin of a perfect baguette. This girl, this girl, when she tries to speak her mouth is dry with the rust of unsaid vowels.
(This poem appeared in the 2021 Live Canon Poetry Prize Anthology)
Bryce
I learn this quilt will contain
a hundred thousand unknown names
all forty-two of my facial muscles
try not to cry as I stitch the memory
of the day you showed me your arms
bejewelled with sarcoma,
how I felt the stutter of your
dancing heartbeat.
I re-imagine you flying home
to die in the Australian sun
while we mourned among
the cold grey bricks of Rotherhithe.
Then the others too were claimed,
one by one, long and slow and cruel
as purgatory. I honour your name
in thread the colour of sunlight,
whispering all the news of all the years
you never knew me.
(This poem appears in both Sue’s full collections, In the Kingdom of Shadows and Confetti Dancers. Go here to find out more about these books.)
A reverse abecedarian in praise of Paris
this city is a jazz riff high as a skylark shouting yes yes yes to April this city is an expletive on the webby wad of your tongue it is not a valentine’s card or a passive verb this city is a crucible for umbrellas a tender prism a slow dance with no stoplights this city is retrofitted with cobbles and revolutionary baguettes this city is acquisitive and pronounceable a psycho-geographic love letter this city is overused a never-ending mosquito bite saying look at my lovely toys all spire and steeple and dome this city thinks it’s a kingdom will make a jumble sale of your heart is an implausible impetuous impinger of your dreams this city is held in the hands of saints an unshareable galette des rois it’s a fickle flirty madame blowing lipstick in your eyes this city is a raised eyebrow a dust-bath for little sparrows and all their bright chansons this city will never be a cardigan it’s a bourrée executed when the Seine runs red with sunset this city is an abyss and I’m still falling because this city is
(A version of this poem was highly commended in The Plough Poetry Prize 2022)