The Locked Door

Something a bit new: poetry. And something new for me too as this is the first fanfic I’ve posted. Most of the poems centre on the events of Order of the Pheonix and the locked door at the books centre, the door which hides the secret to J.Ks great books.

 

Disclaimer: Obviously JK owns all characters, events and things relating to the Harry Potter book. The title to ‘Letter to Hermione’ is stolen from a David Bowie song, though the actual content has nothing to do with it.

 

The Three Year Long Summer

Three years is it?

Endless ages in front of the hour glass,

watching a website’s countdown in

days, hours, minutes and seconds to the release

of the fifth book. We waited in darkness,

reading small reports in the newspapers

about the ghost of celebrity and your writers block,

still petrified under that huge, unbending shadow

you left us with on the platform three years ago.

 

And still we wait, sensing

The phoenix flame that will breathe fire into our meagre existence.

 

 

Looking for J.K.

I have read every word of your books,

enchanted figures flying out of the page at me.

Characters that melt into each other

like some strange potion you might write about.

 

Yet I remain blinded by camera lenses

and the false glamour of fame,

your name in newsprint in Time Magazine.

 

I do not really know you.

I can only imagine, probably wrongly,

your life as a single mother in dark and lonely

Edinburgh, spending time in

run-down cafes writing out your creation,

hoarding wages for a leap to freedom,

visited only by the geniuses who creep

through the pages of those books.

 

 

Letter to Hermione

For a long time I thought I knew you.

I looked at you and saw a dusty old textbook

which the stammering pupil recites cover to cover.

Nothing new there. Nothing to strike a spark.

The immaculate handwriting, mountains of

parchment, a prefect’s badge, a scowl,

that frustrating blindness to others around you;

I saw that. But what else lurked, somewhere

beneath the layers of skin. I felt nothing,

missed the curious tendency that

makes everyone fall in love with you.

I was blind to your individual ghost,

that moment when all your little inadequacies are

transfigured, and one memory merges with another

like an eel swallowed in a basket of eels.

Little stars on your personal astrologer’s heaven.

 

I look at you and see spew, periwinkle-blue silk, a troll in a toilet

one distant Halloween, in a red haze you slapping Draco Malfoy,

Rita Skeeter trapped in a jar, a good-luck kiss, that grouchy Bulgarian git,

the young girl petrified on a hospital bed, a time turner,

the unusual musk of perfume.

 

 

The Only Wizard He Ever Feared

So its true you are only human,

With human fears and dreams.

Even, in the end, a human tear

As you watch a fifteen-year old boy

See his only family die again.

I imagine your voice falters

Like an out-of-tune musical instrument

As you pile on your human form

The shadow of an inhuman burden,

Blaming yourself for a man’s death.

At last she reveals to us your frailty,

The inner secret that must have

Ripped you open for nearly five years.

 

And yet the aura you cast, like a strange shadow,

Around you only deepens. Is your whimsical

Humour a mere deflection, an answer

To your fate as secret keeper to a thousand dark secrets?

What more is hidden from us, or perhaps even from you?

Do you hold a key that will open the door

To the mystery we are all immersed in?

 

Poem for Remus Lupin

 

An old man in a thread-bare waistcoat,

utterly invisible in the bustling crowd

of King’s Cross Station with its weird assortment

of businessmen, young families and owls.

You always were on the edge,

at home with your various anonymities.

Who would have known, or even guessed,

your fabulous history: the way death,

like the moon, had haunted your step since

watching Sirius fall through the veil a week ago?

 

Standing a little away from the others,

quiet and polite as usual.

Like a ghost you can see straight through.

 

Like a man with a hole in himself.

 

 

 

Hero

For James Potter

Your son’s face, which was once your own,

has escaped from the ghost of

his dead father. And that is as it should be.

Because his knight in shining armour was merely

an arrogant fool with a teenage obsession

for hairstyles. The shadow of his inheritance,

as bright as the green jewels of his mothers eyes

which have now become his eyes,

is fled. Melted into dust. And what is left?

An empty cloud of testosterone

and a bad memory.

                        Or is it?

It took me a long time to see past your

clown’s mask, your puppet strings, your childish games.

But I still cling to the image we all invested in,

the echo of your last sacrifice, a final plea:

“Lily, it’s him! Take Harry. I’ll hold him off”

 

 

November 1980

There’s a carnival in the street,

pounding in my eardrums like a seismic tremor.

A celebration for the new dawn.

There are shadows moving in the darkness.

 

The outlaw hides in the corners fearing for his life.

Overhead the flying motorcyclist delivers his sacred cargo.

And everything seems like something else,

something uncertain.

 

And this is where you begin, taken

from the burning house in the arms of a giant.

 

 

 

Advice for Harry Potter

Everybody thinks they own you.

They have grown to know you so well, they think

you need them. Do not correct your critics.

Any attempt to change from their fossilised image

of you will cause pain. They see an innocent,

bespectacled, eleven-year-old amazed at his own reflection.

They put your body in formalin.

Be someone else and they will realise you don’t need them.

They will become confused and may even think

you have betrayed them. And when,

having watched your godfather die,

you stand helpless in Dumbledore’s office

flinging objects into eternity,

and he not doing a thing,

knowing there is nothing to say,

they will merely lie back in their armchair

and grumble that they don’t like your attitude.

 

 

Order of the Phoenix

I

What hidden magic resides in the ink on the page?

I imagine the ingredients.

“Take three frogs legs, a newt,

essence of thestral,

one nosebleed nougat,

a teaspoon of emotion,

a single feather from the tail of a phoenix.

Mix them all together”

 

The result?

A thousand half forgotten scenes.

Boy in a hospital ward collecting sweet wrappers,

a stupid old idiot who “didn’t learn

joined up writing for nothing, you know?”

Sirius Black, a dying man.

II

When the last word has been said,

The last spell cast, what sound fills the silence.

This book draws us close to the veil,

Shows death in a bone-white, thestral-like light.

 

The world falls apart again.

And yet I still believe in Loony Luna’s weird whisperings,

the Weasley Liberation Front and the

fire of the phoenix flame.