The Vision
came at night
into where she dreamed,
in through the nets
it blew, to send her serene.
Each weighty step
had no burden now,
the dark was all light
about her in a glow.
Just…there. She’d motion,
showing us the place,
where He came and touched her
and she … saw His face.
We didn’t want to share
the power or the glory,
or walk along the primrose path
that scented the psalms of her story.
Doolally tap! We’d hymn-out
as she clacked along the corridor,
clutching her marking, her eyes
on fire, marching as to war.
Nicholas McGaughey is a LiteratureWales Mentee. He has new work forthcoming in Poetry Wales/The Atlanta Review/Atrium/Dust/The Island Review/“Beyond The Storm” and Gwyllion Magazine.
A stitch in time
i.m Irena Sendlerowa
No one day in history sobered up enough
to let us walk a thousand straight lines.
Or put aside the yarns spun by
the power-drunk, out of thirst.
She nursed the poor in her work, never
forgetting how to sew up wounds.
Imagine her gone, crippled by torture
shot at dawn and the file closed.
Imagine the digger she’d planned for,
years on, clawing a car park’s foundations,
hitting the jar, climbing down, pulling
the pages as one might a clogged spool,
threading back through foul entanglements
into a flock grazing or a blooming plant.
Note: A Catholic, Irena Sendlerowa rescued 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto and put their names in a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her garden, in order to ultimately reunite them with their families after the war. She survived the war.
Christopher M James, a dual British/French national, is a published author in France where he lives, has won several UK/Irish poetry competitions, most recently the Sentinel LQ Winter Competition 2020, and has been widely published in anthologies.
Flightpaths
after flightradar24.com
The sky’s pale blue is striped by vapour trails
once more. Krakow, you say, Alicante, Dublin.
We wonder if anywhere’s safe. Swifts screech
up and down our street, a hoverfly skims
along a line of poetry in my paperback, drops
down to the next like a cursor. A cup of tea,
a biscuit, a drift of weed smoke from the ginnel.
I look at infection rates, a dragonfly inspects
daisies on a drying bedspread. In the house’s
shade, the bean flowers are orange lanterns.
Two jackdaws chase a red kite across the sky,
a motorbike blurts in the background. A flight
to Madeira gains height. That black flash
of swifts again. They’ll be going soon, you say.
Sharon Phillips has been writing poems since she retired from her career in post-16 education. Her poems have been widely published online and in print.