Maybe he meant that time when the light starts to fail, and talk turns to scaling down the search. When cups of tea and blankets are brought out for the search teams, and everyone knows there’s no hope, but no-one wants to be the first to say it out loud.
Or perhaps he meant that particular time when the search is finally, reluctantly, called off, and the lifeboat is recalled, and you watch it heading for safe harbour around the Cape as darkness falls around you.
Gloaming
Mandy Macdonald
the air darkening, after rain
no, don’t move, not yet
the moment held fast
so as not to undertake
anything fatal
End of Ramadan
Michelle Penn
Mombasa, Kenya
I could tile rooms with stasis.
A wail could replace my voice
denoting the divisions
between the bold and the veiled –
The winding streets of the Arab quarter at dusk:
mosquitoes fight to claim my flesh, I sidestep
buzzing pools, tug the scarf
closer to my eyes.
My skin calls out, I am not like you. It is not faith
but the hand at my back that nudges me
through, belonging
with it or perhaps to it
a woman, too visible, invisible –
Safety is the pattern built by tiles.
His insistence – just one sting and the body goes weak.
I inch the veil aside
not to court impropriety but
to invite
a sea breeze, catch a solitary chant
whisper my own prayer
for this fast to continue – just a bit longer –
The Shortest Day
Sue Johnson
wait at the daylight gate
the gap between the worlds
is thin as a lace curtain
do not be afraid – none will harm you
look for signs of magic
near oak ash and thorn
be aware of crows and ravens
they are the otherworld gatekeepers
sent with messages from loved ones
leave an offering of silver
be thankful for all you have
look for the coming of the light
Factory
Joy Howard
Like sleeping elephants
abandoning the day’s march
machines gasp small breaths
into the cooling dark
now for the night-stoop of owls
for the pale-eyed moon
for teeth bared
at the infancy
of human endeavour
After the Sun, Before the Stars
Jane Aldous
I’d promised to be there, before the half-light dimmed,
before the half-dark was summoned or smoke-grey
changed to implacable blue. Already I could distinguish
no colours but white in the Cornus berries, snowy hens,
Cosmos, washing on the line.
But I was late, it was after the sun and before the stars
were revealed and my eyes were taking time to focus.
People were queuing for buses to take them home,
blackbirds were scurrying back to the roost, streetlights
stuttering into life, the temperature was falling.
All the shapes and shadows had merged by the time
I arrived at the gate. But then I saw the glow of torches
being lit and I joined a raggle of illuminated faces.
Someone handed me a book and before the Moon came up
many odes and ballads were read in the lee of Castle Rock.
Lines from Thomas the Rhymer, The Faerie Queen, Burns,
Scott and Y Goddodin were all invoked. We crossed through
the grey, the haar, the half-closed eyes, the curtain coming down
into the opaque, black ink, the certainty of night.
Decoration of a Fermented Season
Alice Tarbuck
What I am trying to say is that somewhere,
where there is an orchard, a child plunges
her thumb down through rotten flesh to find
the centre of a plum. It is the same core,
hard and ridged, that winter is made of.
Under the leaves, sticky with dark fruit
she knows.
The edges catch as the low sun sinks,
her thumb bleeds
redder than plum-skin, more iron
than tart sugar.
So the winter, because
the orchard is synchronous,
produces sharp channels of frost
along the grass, ices the last of the wasps,
transforms the plums into detritus,
sends her home
in the last light,
rattling in her shoe.
Crow Haibun
Alison Lock
Crow lands on a rowan tree in a shiver of feathers. The thrall days of chill are here. Crow feeds on the berries ripened in the sun of a mellow season. Woodsmoke drifts from a stack with barely a tint on a peaty sky. Black on muted – Crow’s silhouette is sharp – craw, hood, beak.
dark-veins fall
from a copper beech
After the frost the bracken has bleached in the sun, catching the light. Brittle tendrils bristle in the breeze, a rustle to the ear. Crow looks down from the scree and the sky. A single tree stands alone – a skeleton, its thin branches spread.
through the mist
a ghost rises.
The texture of bark is a story – times of growth, of dearth, of abundance – with each crease and every fold. From the silver birch an imprint is shed, casting memory to the ground.
hanging skin,
papyrus
Leaves quiver like stiff wings caught in the trees. A glimpse of past seasons span the gap. It is dusk in the woods. Only the stalks, twigs, the brown husks filter the dying light.
a split trunk
rings meet
Crow takes off, blatting the leaves, cawing as he rises, dropping a stone, a seed to the ground before the lowering sun.
at the day’s end
deadwood blooms
Tempus Erat
Kate Wise
It was that time of night
when leaf turns bat
and skitters mothing
through bruised air
And Perseus
(who would have me call him Perseus)
skips
stabbing gorgon birch with bamboo spear
But I his mother
dear him Achilles
a pearl that blazed so bright
it would burn itself out
blond; blond and blazing
and worry –
where? Where did I keep hold too tight
when I dipped him in the flow?
all this
John Richardson
Can’t shake this late love of summer’s twilight
that dresses sounds of children, back gardens away
a whisk of midges lifts off the pond into a scythe
of swifts; the swallows all agape, upwing.
The passing light silvers our trees,
and grass already flattered, sighs
over late watering rites, sprinklers
do Mexican waves, and waves
of faint laughter ’luminate the fields,
Summer Nights is being karaokeed out of tune
but we keep the windows open,
welcome what air there is inside
to stir a breath of worry about all this.
Yet – what happens – happens. And
night’s sweats throws sheets, curtains,
aside to reveal a cool entertainment:
stars turning on,
and off, just for us.
Then it dawns
that someone,
somewhere,
the latest footfall
on the other side,
has missed
all this.
Starling Time
Laila Sumpton
It’s a day for melting earrings
the lull before – to re-heel boots,
bury diaries, cross out your name
from trees.
A day to relish the gleams you gather
as you heft basket and saunter
as if you carry spirals of eel-
which your mother always said
were the hairs or drowned sailors
swimming out of brine to land
as she’d jar their jelly and hum.
Your wicker traps are left open
woven, door-less, sunken homes
harbouring the pretence
that you’ll be here tomorrow.
You wring the river from you
and follow her to sea.
A murder and murmur heckling sky,
you watch winged shoals dividing,
unable to roost–
and you know which one you will follow
as summer yearns,
as towers beg you to kneel,
as net stitcher gleams shrivel to glints
you walk on under the evening star,
dropping your key in the sand.
Match Girl
Lisa Kelly
Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark, and evening – the last evening of the year.
Hans Christian Andersen
I.
In this story, you’re on the inside
while outside, dusk begins to nibble,
then opens its black mouth and swallows
light in one greedy gulp. Never mind.
You can gorge on goose. That time of year
when food is hearty and the hearth roars,
family forgiven, foes ignored.
You sink tired feet in fluffy slippers
with reindeer faces, and crack walnuts
for the divertissement of plying
a silver tool instead of smoking,
chew on the nuts which cause canker sores.
The Christmas tree shines with candlelight.
Outside, something sparks, flares in the night.
II.
In this story, you’re on the outside,
shaking, looking in through misted glass
at a knife and fork stuck in roast goose
which waddles towards you. Never mind.
It is stuffed with apples and dried plums.
You could be a grandma in heaven.
You could be a girl on heroin.
How many matches left? Do the sums.
Make ends meet as phosphorous strikes brick:
a psychedelic trip of colour.
Burning upon green branches, tapers
which fade to nothing, leaving the dark.
Sometimes, you feel up against a wall.
Sometimes, dusk lets you see a star fall.
Summers Ended in Sweetness
Martyn Crucefix
Under the boughs of the oak named Eve
lies a shape
settling its wheels into the turf
as if to say sooner or later all these things
will sink like this wish-bone
of an old farmyard cart
this four-wheeled broken-backed wreck
with its load of inadvertent scraps
in a metal hopper long since blotched
and scorched with rust
now peppered with acorns and twigs
the seasons’ debris from the spreading trees
and over the bent rear axle
a barrel-shaped composite of metal hoops
around wooden staves
once clamped to each other to be water-tight
the wood originally young and full
now shrunken–the staves lost wholesale–
and it was here baskets of fruit
were brought to be pressed by the screw
winding down to the metal base
until grape juice spilled from the spout
protruding like an obscene tongue
on which decades of summers ended in sweetness
towards which gangs of children
stretched their hands only to be told to scat
to back off by fathers
who heaved at the wooden cross-struts
like a capstan they looked to squeeze more
and still more oozing sweetness
to drink or decant or spill across the ground–
but now it stands and rots
and bolts lie where they drop
and others wriggle loose to fall perhaps
this winter or next
each heavy square-headed iron bolt
a child might gaze at and think it would last
forever instead only long enough
to be outmoded till this four-wheeled cart
came to a stop one September dusk
was left to stand beneath the boughs
of Adam and Eve when somebody thought
it might prove useful one more year
but they never came back
not the baskets not the hands nor the horses
no tractor returned
and no more the children who sometimes stir
out of their sour old age
to stare down into hands stiff and more used
to a walking frame only to find
palms unwrinkled and a little sticky still
with the taste of six or seven summers
Roost
Sue Birchenough
barely there settles the bus stop, with fingerprints of kids, just getting bathed
barely hills
the houses are heavy on the day
they land like flying boats
crash and skid the slates like chalk chittering and squawking –
over pickings, personal space, and the niceties of rank –
when there’s half an inch of beak to do the talking
Red Coat, Wolf, etc.
Katy Lee
The soft hush
of air thinning.
A clarity.
Sound has more cadence.
Colour dims.
Depth of field gone,
all is here and now.
Fact and fiction merge.
The wolves’ yellow eyes shine out
from the car park,
and my wings itch under my coat.
The red had faded to an off-grey
and I sharpen my teeth on my credit card
picking a tuft of fur from between my molars.
My hard focus has become soft.
My peripheral vision has replaced straight ahead.
My linear has become circular.
I sit and wait for the Woodcutter to arrive.
Roosting birds trade places
jostling for a space to tuck their heads.
The owls and stoats have yet to waken.
A pause.
A rift in time.
A chink,
where disorder and chaos
come tumbling in.
Forbidden thoughts are now permissible
I admit to ones I didn’t even know I had,
and you nod in agreement.
And all the while
Grandmother gathers up her bones
places them in a hessian bag
slings it over her back
And walks towards me.
16:30
Katie Evans
At sunset, they cry
in front of the
Gala Bingo’s window
at their own discoloured
faces; without the magic
at their fingertips
the break
breaks their spells.
Women smoking together.
Chipping away
&n
bsp; at their nails to dig into the
dirt beneath.
Calligraphy of Starlings
Aziz Dixon
Words take wing, lapwing
flocks flocking, word-mocking
geese in skeins fly straight
into the sunset with winter-haunting
cries. Words hover,
drop a few feet with feather-light control,
hover again, kestrel
seeking evening meal, no poem
to eat; but, frog-like, my words
slip away into sedge-safety at dusk,
while a calligraphy of starlings
murmurates, restlessly sweeping the sky
with your name, high
over Limey Water.
Calling Them In
Kelly Davis
‘Come home for your tea!’
we called them in, as day fled
and night ate our words.
The sun had already set.
‘Come home for your tea!’
Anxiety edged our voices
and night ate our words.
It was much too late.
The sun had already set.
‘Come home for your tea!’
Anxiety edged our voices,
imagined fears grew larger
and night ate our words.
They grew up so suddenly.
Dusk took us by surprise.
It was much too late.
‘Come home for your tea!’
They could no longer hear us.
The sun had already set,
with darkness at its heels.
and night ate our words.
We were wasting our breath.
It seems a moment ago
but it’s twenty years or more.
Somehow they gave us the slip.
Time wouldn’t wait.
Did we suspect, even then?
Anxiety edged our voices.
Perhaps we had a premonition –
imagined fears grew larger.
We tried to call them home
and night ate our words.
Summer Evening
Lindsay Reid
A faint pink line of clouds
Settles on the church tower.
In the fragrant summer evening
The thrush is calling.