Shape Shifters

Carve wind, carve rain,
Come storm, begin again.
Come winter, come spring,
Come goddess from within.
Come fire in the head,
Come worshipping the dead.
Come footprint and beast,
Come battle and feast.
Come blood and ride,
Come pipe call and red tide.
Come quiet, come calm,
Come atmosphere to disarm.
Come spirit and ghost,
Come frightening the most.
Come secret and be
Come to all that I see.
Come mountain and mother,
Come stand like no other.

-Ali Jones

The Blue Hawk

Stream and hill follow my contours.
This beak is a high jut of rock.
I command the veer of rivers.

My black wing tips
are the storm’s edges.
My gyre makes the gust.
My white feathers, clouds.

Rain is the pelt of water
off my pinions and claws.
One of my eyes is the sun.
The other eye is the moon.

Gravity is my fall.
Death, my talons.
Sharp edge of ice,
my beak makes orphans.

The unwary, unwatchful,
unaware and weak
are morsels for my young
that turn in the world of my eye.

II.

I pass

the dead

to my wife

in

flight.

Two rocks

bridged

by red sinew.

-Paul Brookes

We Are the Badlands

An absence of foliage
In vast canyons
Gives way to something more,
The opportunity to evoke
Emotion from its expanse.
Variegated cutaways of
Ancient earth
Rise and fall
The same way my body
Shudders at your embrace.
What great equalizer
Cuts through earth and
Our bodies, but Time?
And we are all, merely,
Nature laid bare,
Shrouded only
By the eyes of God.

-st

Little things

All that tectonic plates
do is vibrate a little
and crush a civilisation.

All the notions that we
rule every corner of earth,
bury inside the fissures
caused by the earthquake.

Geologists get down
to the business and confirm
that the soul is the epicentre.

-Jay Gandhi

The Sound of Falling

Lost in the tangle of twilight’s thread,
she tucks into the edges
of a rock face,
finds the music of solitude,
blooms into a single note that reaches
into the core of the earth.
The roots of her sorrow
plunge deeply
into the heart of the mountain,
where darkness bleeds like ink
from her veins.
She inhales deeply,
tastes the shadowy tones of silence,
gets heady with longing.
Somewhere in the distance,
a friend calls her name,
pleading.
His voice fades like a ghost into the granite.
She exhales and falls gracefully
into a melody only she and the rocks can hear.

=Susan Richardson

Bios and links

-Jane Cornwell

The Fae Harvest

I never knew how babies grew,
until one night, my grandmother led me out
under the weight of dawn and a lifting sky.

On the mountains shoulders, light cast
out, looking for a new beginning,
And there they were. The conditions have to
Be just right. The moon lining up to sew the pattern,
With Venus, and the other planetary lamps
Measuring shadow and shade.

The old made young again, rising like seedlings
in the dab grey dew, while spiders sung their webs
and the fairy host turned straight on until morning.

Old Mr Begg from the house on the end,
Old Mrs Sutherland, from the garret on the ginnel.
Same face, bodies shrunken, pushing up
in purple heather. A blackbird belled a warning
And my grandmother and I were away to our beds,

But I didn’t sleep again that night, as the sun
pulled up the shutters and roused the animals
from paw twitching dreams to daytime clamour.

I never asked how my grandmother knew.
We never spoke of it again, and I can only think
that she made a pact, to lie amongst the heather
when her time came, to give herself over to them.

-Ali Jones

Unbreakable

In her dreams,
the seasons bleed together.
Birth into burning into silence.

She is a blossom
taking her first sip of air,

a flower
opening itself
to a sky filled with flames,

a petal,
wilting, floating,
falling into a final embrace.

Her heart is weightless here,
soundless and unbreakable.
She reaches through a cloud of fire,
touches the center of the sun.

She feels no pain.

-Susan Richardson

Summer of 1995

My bro & I played Cricket at home.
We broke the “Ajanta” Wall clock.
Petrified of our Dad, we ran to the fields
and sat by the pond in a hope that the frogs
would pop up and that Dad’s anger would
vapourise.

Sun would set late and evenings
were all about lemonades.
We would climb the trees without
a plan of how to get down! On
certain days while taking rest in farms,
we would fall asleep.

Mom would come into the fields
screaming my name in search of me.

And today, father has lost his sting,
mother has lost her hearing & my wife
goes in search our kids to the farms.

-Jay Gandhi

Latency

The best
The future has to offer
Serenely rests
On the mountain, or in some valley
Already preparing to solve crimes,
Write stories, cure diseases; tiny bodies, home to giant minds.

As dew on mountain grasses waits
To evaporate in the morning sun,
Transforms to return to earth as rain,
These, too, shall arise
With a transfer of latent energy
To meet the world’s expectancy.

-st

The One Hand

of the hillside holds curled up bairns.
Some nestle into its palm dream a sunrise
or a sunset whilst the cold lake awaits

their splash and play in the bath of their days .
For some it is the evening of their lives
and will not see another sun. Shepherds

gathering stock from these moors
will find their white bones under ferns
as they take their sheep to be sheared
down paths only the animals know.

These are the lost and unremembered bairns.

-Paul Brookes

Bios and links

-Jane Cornwell

Hush Hush

When I was really small, we used to walk along a disused track,
still called the railway line. It wasn’t one of Beeching’s cuts,
but an old quarry service route, stone blasted, raining fossils,
in a red Marlestone fog. Nature had taken it back, of course.

I can remember, running far from my Mother’s grasping cries,
under charged boundaries, trying them with fingers and tongue –
waiting for the jolt, wanting to feel the danger, reminding me
to always remain anchored to the earth – a sapling still tentative.

One day, racing to the horizon, I found the old signal box.
door long gone, paint peeling, just the hint of memory.
A small banked hearth and singing kettle, a neat brushed uniform.
I didn’t see it a first, yet somehow I knew to bow my head.

There in the corner, a wheel of twigs and fur, garnished
With a twist of orange twine. We locked eyes and I knew
it was her space, retreating, never breaking contact, as if
caught in the spell of shell and yolk. She lifted over my head,

to show me a clutch of pale blue hopes. I walked back to my
Mother, not knowing whether to share surprise or keep silent.
Instead I called for sticklebacks resting a small blue bucket,
to slide slipstream again later. I always kept her secret safe.

-Ali Jones

This Egg Asks

his dad to take the egg cup
from him in the dark garden.
Joins his Good Egg disciples.

Later his disciple Bad Egg
Judas licks him
and he is arrested.

Soldiers break him,
His yolk bleeds.
Nailed to a cross

the egg gets wet
in a storm.
Taken down, wrapped,

he is placed in a box,
discovered to be empty,
the wrapper discarded.

Disciples go on an egg hunt.
Later learn he has risen
to the mouth of his dad.

-Paul Brookes

First day @ Job

Today the chick’s
shell has cracked.

It rubs its eyes
while it struggles
to get up on
its feet.

It will learn fast
to run fast; run
zigzag, cut lanes
& fly.

The world
is a beautiful
place—
full of scavengers.

-Jay Gandhi

The Forgotten One

The one that came first
has flown the coop.
She was prettier than you,
smarter,
had feathers made of gold.
The one who came second
died in a storm
that lasted thirty years.
He was kinder than you,
gentler,
had feathers as delicate as petals.
Now it’s just you here,
sullen and plain,
feathers tattered like rags
and an egg that will never hatch.

-Susan Richardson

Anatomy of a Chicken

Red jungle-fowl descendant,
Gallus gallus,
Numbering 23.7 billion,
These are the real dominators Of the globe.
Perhaps it’s no wonder,
In Greece
They taught valor. But today,
This mighty omnivore
Is reduced to
General Tso’s and Tikki Masala.
The aggressor, become victim.
So, what’s a chicken made of?
Surely not fear,
But resignation.

-st

Bios and links

-Jane Cornwell