Lampyris
Stumbling along the lane
through a tunnel of grasping branches,
he couldn’t see his hand
in front of his face.
This is no idle cliché
or exaggeration;
he simply couldn’t.
Emerging in the open
on the great limestone hillside,
he stood enthralled
by all the small glimmers
like soft, safe radium.
Mark Totterdell’s poems have appeared widely in magazines and have occasionally won competitions. His collections are This Patter of Traces (Oversteps Books, 2014) and Mapping (Indigo Dreams Publishing, 2018).