Darkling
It grew late and started to darkle.
I know, I know but I’m feeling archaic, OK?
If I want to go all poetic, I will. If I want
to go back to the fifteenth century
that’s my call, alright? If you don’t like it
I suggest you get out of my poem.
Anyway, as I was saying, it darkled
and somebody told the moon.
He came up with the goods. He likes
a bit of darkling, does the moon.
It’s right up his street. Just the moon
and you and me at that door
where the moths got all confused.
Afterwards, I sat on the CO’s swivel chair
and watched them on the monitor
hurling themselves at the light.
Your dark hair was my undoing,
not to mention your heart.
Oh your hair was beautiful,
as Blondie sang, back in the day
when she was plain Debbie Harry
and all the boys in 4G lusted after her.
If there are shades of black
yours was the blackest, it was off the chart.
Carole Bromley‘s second collection, The Stonegate Devil, will be published by Smith/Doorstop in October. website http://www.carolebromleypoetry.co.uk
Thunderhead Light
Thirty miles of visibility
makes a window onto
the shining estuary and
black mountains beyond
with charcoal piles of cloud,
lit through with lightning,
lightening themselves by
shedding white sheets of rain.
The light is silent : nevertheless it
howls with energy, with imminence,
a spotlight on the grey curtains
that will part and loose the bolt.
Oh we are children again,
safe in the car watching,
secretly fearful that
the thunder will come close
and we will wet ourselves.
Vivien Jones Her first poetry collection was – About Time,Too (Indigo Dreams Publishing in September 2010) In that year she also won the Poetry London Prize.
She has completed a second short fiction collection on a theme of women amongst warriors – White Poppies (2012) 1950s. Her second poetry collection is –‘Short of Breath’
(November 2014 Cultured Llama Press)
The Boy Who Flew in His Sleep
Some nights, my children will not sleep. They fear weightlessness,
the madness of the sandman, the map a mind might draw when left
to wander, the sharp turn of a dream, the hot patter of falling stars.
I comfort them with warm milk, carry them to my bed, tell them
the story of this mattress: fibres conjured by engineers to hold
an astronaut amid the turmoil of incomprehensible space.
I watch them sleep beyond my gravity, the flicker of small eyes
under private paper lids. I think of a boy I knew who walked
in his sleep, whose wish for wings, the story goes, led him to the roof
and over the edge. I swear he’s still afloat the way his dream foretold
beside that fifth floor window, the breeze rocking him like a cradle.
Sometimes I think it’s really him. Sometimes I have to pinch myself.
Jacqueline Saphra‘s first collection, The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions (flipped eye), developed with the support of The Arts Council of England, was shortlisted for the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize 2011. ‘Geometry’ appears in The Kitchen of Lovely Contraptions.