Guillemots huddle on a cliff ledge; indifferent in monochrome, they’re packed together to the edge. Experienced and fully fledged like pilots from an aerodrome, guillemots huddle on a cliff ledge. Hidden by coarse and salty sedge that sprouts among the seaside foam, they’re packed together to the edge. The ridge is a place of anchorage, […]
Tag: dverse Poets Pub
Heavy Plant Crossing
The country road tilts and blends into a sudden blind bend, overhung with bush and tree, so dense that, at first, I do not see a red and white sign erupting from a pile of soil: heavy plant crossing. My imagination runs riot with giant hogweed and triffids evolved from seeds that drifted down from […]
Pepper
She offers him a bright red capsicum, a lonely heart, filled with peppery seeds. She holds her breath, bares delicate, perfumed skin, anticipates a sharp knife’s sting: seeds are spilled, her heart sliced and diced into a hot stew, a […]
Midsummer Verges
Content in our garden’s leafy shade, I think back to weedy margins on a distant council estate, full of dandelions and significance, between pan-hot pavement and simmering black tar, a strip of withered grass, litter-strewn and dotted with dog mess, where bike wheels used to spin, click, tick; children clutched coins in sweaty hands at […]
Fay Watson and the Empty Chair
You want me to sit on what you think is an empty chair? Not while he sits there, his soft blond hair matted with blood, face grey as the smoke from the gun I pressed to his head. He’s not dead to me, he’s locked in my brain, a bloody stain I can’t scrub clean. […]
Landing in Sand
When I was at school I loved athletics, especially long jump. The feeling of sprinting up to the board as fast as I possibly could and then taking off into space filled me with expectation and elation, with the wind in my face and the dappled shadows of the trees in the sand, freshly raked […]
House Martins
below the roof edge on a jutting ledge snowy flash of feathered legs returning to eggs busy between hawthorn hedge and the young they fledge dizzy Kim M. Russell, 2017 House Martins by Mark Kilner from the Springwatch Flickr group, found on bbc.co.uk. My response to dVerse Poets Pub Meeting the Bar – Lai it […]
