Aberfan

The hillside had continued to spill
onto the hand-digging first responders.

Cliff Michelmore, in stark black and white,
his words threading, stitching,

beside himself with grief.
My mother never cried so much.

She’d had the two of us, had learnt
how children bury their riddles, how love

unearths them. Upstairs, my uninhabited bed,
cold as empty storage, safe as houses.

I gazed at the wall shadows, gently
swaying, memory-less, alive,

hearing all the voices calling out again
across the levelled land. Then

the moonlight’s beautiful hanging hand
and the stars which called me lodger.

Christopher M James, lives in the Dordogne, France. He has been published in Acumen, Magma, Orbis, Dream Catcher, London Grip, Poetry Salzburg, The London Magazine, amongst others. He has also been widely anthologised, and has won various competition prizes: Sentinel, Yeovil, Poets meet politics, Wirral, Hastings, Stroud….