Christmas Morning – Wharfedale.
We had to travel early along deserted lanes,
the mist a gauzy cloth on fields and river,
light thawing, promising little but a milky drift.
Ghost trees harnessed the fell, frost rigged,
quicksilvered, cutwork on the iron sky.
The tops, ice-laden, unreadable beneath
a smeared wash of cloud.
You stopped to photograph the frozen woods,
the river, stalled by scales of ice, stiff reeds,
as if from a glass blower’s crackling pipe.
Cold drove you back, stamping, to the car,
your breath, lung-fog. Home, you said.
The road ahead a constellation of sleet.
Lesley Quayle is a folk/blues singer and poet, living and working in deepest, darkest rural Dorset.
The Door
There is no door.
How then to make an entrance?
Perhaps a dramatic appearance;
enter angel stage left,
maybe flying in
through the open window,
or else strolling,
nonchalant
from the garden,
surprising her as she sits
at peace on the portico.
But there is a door.
One essential entrance,
the threshold and boundary
between two spheres,
where space is shrunk,
time and eternity
collapsed into one,
the passage between
earth and heaven
flung wide open
by her words.
Sally Long has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East London and is a PhD student at Exeter. She has had poems published in magazines including Agenda, Haiku Quarterly, Ink, Sweat and Tears, London Grip, Snakeskin and has work forthcoming in Poetry Salzburg Review. Sally edits Allegro Poetry Magazine and is a member of Ver Poets.