Two Poems by Tim Cumming

Evacuation

The future was a klaxon
from the past. We followed it
back to its vanishing point,
stood there taking photographs,
watching as one by one
all living primates left
the picture — core exposed
and clear this area — hoof prints
in the lower chambers
and below that, flood water.
Do not descend. Do not enter.
The gravity here is punishing,
words too heavy to speak
or lift. They hang in the air
and swell in the heat,
rotting like chunks of meat.
The world you knew is a noose,
familiar tools round upon
themselves with use.

Target Area

The letters of her name
pass before his eyes
in vast luminous waves,
heavy weather churning
in the gutters and drains
beneath his feet and him
acting as if the world was
not hanging with its mouth
wide open but spinning
its loom between his fingers,
tracing out patterns on sheets
of paper filled with one inscrutable
face after another, each pointing
in his direction as he runs
incredibly quickly down
the middle of the street.

Tim Cumming has published 10 collections, ranging from 1991’s The Miniature Estate with Smith/Doorstop through 1999’s Apocalypso with Stride to The Rapture (Salt, 2011), Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop (2015), and Knuckle (2019), which were published by Pitt Street Poetry in Sydney, Australia. Blueprint Poetry published his pamphlet Adventures Among the Living in 2022. His work has appeared in Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry, the W. S. Graham anthology The Caught Habits of Language, and Bloodaxe Books’ anthology of poetry from Ireland and the British Isles, Identity Parade. In 2007, he made the BBC documentary Hawkwind: Do Not Panic.