Chris Hardy & Camilla Lambert

Chris Hardy

Auspices
Athene Noctua

We felt we were being watched
And turning saw an owl
Poised on a rock at midday
Still and intent.

There were grasshoppers
On the hill behind the beach
And damsel flies flickering
Along the water’s edge,

But for the moment
The small bird considered
If we could remain.

She drew everything to her,
Even the sea stopped moving
Then she was gone as if

She’d not been there.
The crickets and the sea
Were allowed to sing again

And the place
Was an ounce lighter
Now its soul had left.

Chris Hardy’s poems have been published widely in magazines, and in anthologies. He has won prizes in the National Poetry Society’s, and other, competitions. Chris is in LiTTLe MACHiNe (little-machine.com).

Camilla Lambert

East, West

These are places I will never see again
a Cretan square where paired boots hung in lines,
red wool on Marrakesh roofs, drying in skeins,
Cilento cliffs dark with umbrella pines.
There are others where I’ll never watch for dawn
or sunset: Patagonia’s Last Hope Sound,
its coscoroba swans, peaks of Matterhorn
and Cotapaxi peering over clouds.

Always, I return to a wrought iron gate
overhung each side by a fuchsia hedge,
a sundial grey-faced with Delabole slate,
jam jars and a key on a window ledge.
Far below, waves sluice over seagull trails
in sand, cowries small as children’s finger-nails.

Camilla Lambert began writing poetry on retirement in 2007. Her first pamphlet Grapes in the Crater was published by Indigo Dreams Publishing . She co-organises a small arts festival in Binsted, near Arundel,

Daichi Ishikawa

Art

Between my bureaucratic brain
and your bucolic train of thought
are shady spots of time called art.

Will anything so uncertain
in the world in which we live
remain intact? You say it will
though I cannot believe.

If we, behind your velvet curtain,
could hide a vague voluptuous idea
of our own interrupted works of art
then, I should be relieved.

The beautiful, sublime, at times
suspend my mythopoetic piety,
and autocorrect our cringing crimes
of imperfection, influence, anxiety,
of lasting lyric listlessness, a sense
of loneliness immense.

I swear and pray, in silky solitude, perusing Baudelaire,
and sup again a cup of emptiness, ennui, a symphony
once gold, now cold, before our time is up and down I go
and fade away into the restless realm of art for art
as though – I know – nothing really falls apart.

Daichi Ishikawa was born in Japan and has been an Anglophile since before
he started learning English at school, years before his first authentic British
pub experience. He read English at university while in Tokyo, where he
acquired an incurable habit of book-collecting and cat-stroking, as well as a
taste in British Aestheticism through reading Walter Pater’s The Renaissance. He has lived in London since 2014, currently completing a Ph.D. in English at Queen Mary University of London. In the art of poetry, he constantly aspires
towards what Pater called ‘the condition of music’.

Art.mp3

Sally Sandler

Precious Seconds

A single second ‒only one,
“one one-thousand” ‒that is all.
And in that void, a race is won,
a hawk strikes, the dove falls;
the rain begins, the drought is done,
the atom splits, the future calls.

Time enough to say, “I do,”
and seal a love against the fates,
or, beseeching, “I love you,”
regardless of the vow that breaks.
A falling star fades from view,
the night swallows fire it makes.

Cars crash, a bone breaks,
the cat jumps and milk is spilled.
In the little time that takes
the addict takes a deadly pill.
A spirit reaches open gates,
leaving dust upon the hill.

A button’s pushed, a bomb drops,
a final suture ‒healing starts.
The tiger dies when gun pops,
a muttered utterance breaks a heart.
The midwife cries, “Push, don’t stop,”
and in that time, a life embarks.

Much begins, and so much fits
within a second ‒easily.
The space inside is fathomless,
a window to eternity.

Sally Sandler is a graduate of the University of Michigan and has lived in San Diego for over
forty years. She is a docent and historian at the San Diego Botanic Garden, as well as a wife, a mother, and a grand-mother of four. Her writing is informed by those personal journeys and by a deep connection with the outdoor world.

Archive