For Paul Brookes’ December challenge.

Owl light and rainbow songs

Light brushes
sky and water colours
chalk and oil hues
the colour of the hidden belly of shells
cloud-smudged charcoal
the luminous neon
of storm cloud sunbursts
garlanded with rainbows

and dark night tidies
all the glitter away
with owl-feather plumes
sweeping stars bright-clean
and the soft songs of silence.

A short piece for Paul Brookes’ December challenge.

Patron saints and magpies

Her mantlepiece was a gallery of saints, each one with a specific job to do. There were statuettes of various sightings of the Virgin Mary, and a sheaf of Mass cards ready to be consulted and invoked with the prayer written on the back.
Her favourite idolatrous image was Saint Martin de Porres, in the form of a statue I was convinced was Cy Grant in Dominican robes. She loved Martin because he loved animals, and he had a position of prestige on top of the cabinet in the front room from where he could beam over at the Infant of Prague in his glass case above the gas fire.
Saint Martin was brought out mainly to bless eyesight, in particular my youngest sister’s. She had perfectly good eyesight when Saint Martin was ministering to it, but later…

Here is today’s poem for Paul Brookes’ December challenge

Eels

Elegance of streamlining,
elongated, electric sometimes,
eels slip from Sargasso
to Severn and Seine,
sleek and serpentine,
silver-green,
keeping to dim shallow-shadows,
ever moving on and back,
birth to death
and the long voyage in-between.

Transparent infant cleaners
of marine snowdrifts,
then silver-sleek and tubular,
they hunt the teeming mud
and sand for bottom-dwellers,
upriver and down,
drawn ineluctably back
to Sargasso weed
and the calm of tideless,
tidy waters.

This is a poem inspired by the last three rewilding suggestions of Paul Brookes’ December challenge. You can see them on Paul’s blog here.

Sacred circles

Curled about her cubs,
every furred mother-sun
radiates love-warmth,

lake water gathers up in gentle hands,
broad wings, long necks, flecked and flocked
with bird-drift, gives them back to the sky,

worm tunnels clear through earth-mould,
the composted death of years past,
breathing air and life into the passage graves

of leaves, field maple, oak,
and the sifted bones and shells
of wild ossuaries.

All things curl, bow, bend,
the cycle re-cycled, reforming and recurring,
sun, moon, stars reflecting lifetimes.

This week I was happy to see what I’m calling my ‘experimental pantoums’ appear in One Hand Clapping. The magazine is one of those online gems, fully of interesting stuff. This is all down to the editorial choices – it’s elegantly curated and varied. I think journal and magazine choice quality is subjective, I tell mentees that they should submit work the magazines and journals they respect and who feature work that they themselves like to read over where they think their work should appear, but there is definitely a difference in quality between a hastily thrown together online magazine and something like this one in which thought has gone into the aesthetics, the curation, the identity of the magazine. Putting together a magazine is a labour of love that takes many more hours of time that perhaps is imagined. I strongly suggest…