Genny Rahtz

Poems from 'Prayer Flags' by Genny Rahtz

I Never Noticed 

I never noticed
for twenty years
that we live in a city
with the same name as a boat,
a city imbued with tidal
and sky rhythms.

We watched two rivers
play chameleon
with Davy's Gray,
Sepia, Burnt Umber,
Neutral Tint, Cerulean
and Yellow Ochre,
and those overlapping
water-colour names
I can't resist.

 

Up River

I always wanted to drop dye
in the Swale or Nidd
and wait for the proof of their continuity
through the Ouse
to the half-fresh, half-salt,
Humber estuary
whose brown water
shines round the matt city
where I used to live.

Now I've moved up river
but arrives here slowly
layer by layer.

I cannot swoop down,
secure in a shared sense of land,
but must live on the thin top-soil
of a personal dream-time
in this cats' cradle
drainage basin of the Ouse Ouse
I have to learn the language
of a new geography. 

• 'Prayer Flags' is an A5 (148mm x 210mm) publication.
• 16 pages in total 
• Hand-made & hand-stitched pamphlet with a full-colour wrap-around dust jacket.

 

Authors

Genny Rahtz is the author of “Prayer Flags”, published by Flux Gallery Press in 2006. Her roots in the poetry world were established whilst attending Douglas Dunn’s poetry workshops in Hull and she was one of ten poets published in the anthology “A Rumoured City Revisited” published by Bloodaxe (1982). A keen traveller, her work reflects the appearance and spiritual workings of both the world of nature and the environmental impact of humanity on the landscape.