Just before the Royal Wedding some poems about heart by Simon Barraclough

Wiki Heart

by Simon Barraclough
(from the forthcoming Neptune Blue, Salt Publishing.)
Someone put my heart on Wikipedia.
Just a stub.
Un
     stub
            stantiated
awaiting citations.
The entry is unkind,
I hope that any reader clicks on by
as Dionne Warwick might advise.
Anyone who had a heart
would do well
to set it apart,
ring fence and firewall and snap up its domain
in perpetuity.

Magpie Heart

Stick your ‘gimlet eyes’
into your stuffed and mounted travesties
Don’t flatter yourself that I’d want yours,
to wet my beak
in the inkhorns of your vanities.
When you see me you say,
‘One for sorrow.’
When I see a magpie,
I count myself too,
and every time it’s, ‘Two for joy.’

Simon Barraclough was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, but has lived in London since 1996. He won the poetry section of the London Writers’ Prize in 2000 and his debut, Los Alamos Mon Amour (Salt Publishing) was a finalist for the Best First Collection in the Forward Poetry Prizes 2008. In 2010 he published a boxed ‘minibook’of commissioned poems, Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins). His work appears in the anthologies Identity Parade (Bloodaxe 2010) and Poems for Love (Penguin 2009).

Orca Heart

I feel safe because I know
your teeth will bend right back
as they encircle me

but in they go.
And now the quicks of all ten nails are gone
from scraping the splintered deck.

You have the better half of me.
Who thought you'd be so inflexible?
I'll never put on a life jacket
again.

NB. Paul Vermeersch also references 'heart' in his poem about a Baboon in Reinvention of the Human Hand. Hope Kate and Wills have a happy marriage. From me, in one.