For Paul Brookes’ challenge.

Our small town hit the national news yesterday for all the worst reasons—a fourteen-year old schoolgirl from the collège was abducted and murdered on Friday. The police arrested her killer within four hours of the girl’s mother sounding the alarm, but it was already too late.

Nowhere is safe for girls or women to walk alone. Yesterday 80,000 women marched to protest against our political leaders’ lack of interest in the crimes perpetrated against 51% of the population. It’s 2022 not 1022, surely time for women’s rights to be taken seriously.

Small town Sunday

We walked beneath the heavy clouds
en deuil beneath the spitting tearful rain,
in the tolling wind we trod a pall of leaves.

Herons called, untidy flocks
of cormorants black as priests, stilts
in the river water, egrets statue-white,

and through the heavy tolling sky,
a single gull headed for the…