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 […]
Tag: Tuesday Poetics
Solo Flight
In the silver silence of morning’s first rays, she is woken from the vastness of the double bed by a bee munching her way out of a nest secreted in an air vent. After a long winter spent in a cocoon, waiting for warmer weather to eat herself free from nesting cavities plugged with grains […]
Going Underground
swept down rain-wet steps at the Broadway shoes slip surfing the crowd going underground Oyster swipes through the […]
Sad Pathetic Fallacy
The world was disappointing, dry and thirsty, full of sadness, longing for some artistic creativity, when the slate sky flickered with metallic electricity. Thunder rumbled. The brawling river, rushing with rain-swollen flow, swung into a roaring curve below towards a thundering waterfall, rearing in glassy surges, snagging on the riverbed, like King Lear on the heath: […]
Parole
What has been imprisoned under the lawn all winter? Frozen mud, rendered malleable by spring warmth, releases rusty skeletons of ginger bud cases, last spring’s copper fairy lights. Stones and flint jingle underfoot, sigh a heavy scent from crumbly lumps of black earth, exuding worms from clumps, evicting glossy beetles from ivy tangled in the […]
A Taste for Arsenic
I resist the urge to touch my tongue to the toxic crystals, leaden grey, stir the poison in, although not so long for it to eat the spoon away. Not a year have I been his wedded wife and already his voice has a steely edge like the sharpened blade of the butcher’s knife in […]
Playground by the Village Hall
On Mondays, the village hall is closed: no community cinema, yoga or bingo. Even the clock has slowed almost to a stop. I crunch across the gravel, past the football pitch, dodge clumps of daisies and jump a little ditch. No dogs allowed inside the playground with its drooping swings, not-so-merry-go-round, empty slide and ropes […]
