Artwork: Untitled 53 by Gill Robinson

Missing 1
Gina Wisker

So where are the bodies?
Buried?
Who's to blame?
We're all pointlessly gathered here
leaving
long shadows in the long blasted grass wandering
wondering about
the source of the endless unrest
some facing one way
some another
encircled by this grass, this endless overgrowth and undergrowth.
Wondering –
Where are the bodies?



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Artwork: Untitled 53 by Gill Robinson

Missing 2
Gina Wisker

At the end of the road
they are no longer excavating
the Bronze Age settlement.
The skulls, the rings, the bodies, the histories, the
suddenly surfaced traces
momentarily
forcing a pause in the development
The diggers thrumming and waiting
To one side.

They strain to enact
The command.

Forget it.
Forget who was here and what happened right here.
The Love and hate,
the deaths, the births.
Forget it.
Concrete it over now.
Build
identical small houses for rich people.
Obliterate the living history
at the end of our road at the end of
the ancient city.
But we’re standing here together neighbourly
in some kind of memorial.
Pausing our own wars.
For the moment.

And long beyond that moment now
particularly at night
I hear the sounds of sacrifice,
the cries
of mourning and of loss.
I see
bodies lowered into graves.
Small skulls and large brooches,
tibia and fibula,
eyes gone from sockets.
Just old dead neighbours maybe or
like Seamus Heaney's bog girl
sacrificed
in some long forgotten ritual
for some long forgotten
now devalued
pointless
crime
of being different
upsetting someone
some way.
Anyway
they were
revealed to us momentarily because we questioned.
The cover up was paused for what is but
a second, split in time.
The diggers were re-started
the newly nearly living history
concreted over
for progress.

What do we know about them?
Those bronze age people,
our neighbours?
Nothing.
What will we know about them?
less than nothing.

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Artwork: Untitled 49 by Gill Robinson

Ghost Dancers
Gina Wisker

They’re nearly gone now
The ghost dancers
Elegant
Focused
Their blurred edges
Their intent steps
Dissolving
As my memory
Of exactly who they were
and when
And How
and why
They were dancing
And what my part in this
Was
If I even had
A part
All
Hazy
Dissolving
Done

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Nothing Permanent 41 Welcome to My Party
Gina Wisker

Who invited you all?
Did I invite you?
She’s at the back, the hag, the peasant woman with her sacrificial
pet
sheep
Holding her shocked hands up to the sudden party
guests of our past
they’re ghostly witnesses
just standing there
their eyes contacting
nothing.
no one.
Some just shuffling
Re-arranging
hovering

On the right a medieval couple
and at our feet are children.
On the far left an angel or a demon warrior
This much is unclear
These are perhaps our pasts our futures or
the stages of our lives
which haunt us.
Grey white figures,
their meaning and their influence
emerging from the half light
from the dusk and the dust
I can write over and over your haunting presences to scratch them out
or highlight them
still
all meaning that I draw is hesitant
Inchoate
the indecipherable scribbles
of the everyday macabre.

Who invited you all?
Did I invite you?
Yes I invited you all
and so.
Let the party begin.