Eighteen Years of Advents Gone

Because My Father is Now a Crow

We pick up where you left off, searching still,
choosing random cards from a dealer’s deck:
twenty-one crows in a night-time tree,
deep within the dark, with all that chatter

all that noise, dying down, and the moon
looming a lopsided, stroke-faced grin,
her light kissing the wood of the trees,
silvering one side, leaves turned x-ray vision

veined, black-stacked building windows spilling
back buttered-yellow light, onto the snowy edges
of the scene and maybe the fear of a pond, subtle,
hidden, creaking under all that weight

my brother said he found you in a dream,
near the frozen lake, he followed your song,
your love still feathering the depth of sorrow’s nest,
and there a sad gift, an egg breached too soon.

The next card plays the trick, spells out grief,
quieter now but never gone.

Amy Rafferty is a writer and photographer from Glasgow.  She studied poetry at Glasgow University and writes in both Scots and English. Her work has been published in Magma, Contralytic, Envoi, Causeway/Cabshair, The North, Acumen, The Interpreter’s House, Lallans and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She is currently working towards finishing her first collection

For the Breaking of Winter

For the hour in the warmth of the room;
for the touch of the dark; for the seeing eye-
to-eye with the cry now crystallised as
fox crouched in the unkept grass outside

the bathroom window with its dullfire fur
and its breath a January blade; for the bones
of grass in the black earth; for the baby’s wail
through the night’s walls; for the funeral pyre

that might yet become a field bed
brightening; for the breaking of winter;
for the minute when your eyes feel the waters
rise, and your breath is a blow, and it is

the booze – a bit – but also all that rosy
unfolding in the corners of these closed eyes
that you hope will be there when the world returns,
and you might not see, but you will try.

Tim Kiely is a criminal barrister and poet based in London.

Post

The cards are in the post, for Christmas Past
and Present, for the faces, names, not seen
but kept in mind. Hand-written, scribbled fast,
travelled in sacks, jostled in vans — between
our here, your there — arriving (Look!) to shine
in hallways, kitchens, sitting rooms, the lot — on
time (we hope), remembering Auden’s line:
for who can bear to feel himself forgotten.

D.A.Prince lives in Leicestershire and London. Her second full-length collection (Common Ground, HappenStance, 2014) won the East Midlands Book Award 2015. Her third collection, The Bigger Picture (also from HappenStance) was published in 2022.

Note: Previously published in 24 Poems for Christmas, Live Canon, 2024