Alessio Zanelli

The Brigand

I only wished to start a new one.

May this be home? Millstone grit and heather?
Undulating pastures and drystack fences?
The dales once ruled by the Brigantes?
A place this ancient ‒ where days glide by so slow
and human presence is not a fundamental trait ‒
surely wrings my deepest strings.
Lost in it, on my own, carrying nothing,
and nothing loaded on my mind ‒
it looks, sounds and smells
like I had always been part of it.
Everything fits just right, and I feel good.
Like I had been treading these moors
and my thoughts ascending these ridges ‒
to see what runs away beyond the hilltops ‒
since the very moment I was born.
Still, it is when the light abates
and cloudbanks slither down to cloak the slopes ‒
emulating lowland fog ‒
when the lines of trees fade on the horizon
and silence appropriates each quiver of life ‒
coming to nestle in the most distant memories ‒
that I do find myself at home.
But sooner or later the sun ‒as precious as gold
and of such rare beauty on this drowsy, sullen land,
orchestrator of grandiose skies ‒
reminds me who I am, or who at least I used to be,
where my roaming soul indeed belongs,
hurling me a thousand miles southeast.
For I am a brigand here ‒
my loot the eternal swish of branches in the westerlies
and the instancy of desperate sunsets over the crests.
A sly usurper, a thief of space and time.
All while galaxies out there keep on drifting,
and the clock cannot be zeroed.

I only wished to start a new one.

Alessio Zanelli is an Italian poet who writes in English and whose work has
appeared in some 170 literary journals from 15 countries. His fifth original
collection, titled The Secret Of Archery, was published in 2019 by Greenwich Exchange Publishing (London).

Gordon Scapens

Sanity Inspector

A sanity inspector calls,
says I’ve scrawled poems
in my head, suspicious statements.

He thinks he can see
my lonely wasted pleading
behind the charade of eyes,

once hoped-for ideals of peace
with nowhere to belong
in the world’s parade.

But he can’t prove anything
without knowing a mask
covers a face of helplessness,

or until he can recognise
the attitude of a man drowning
in his own convictions.

The words are locked away,
doing time in solitary,
like prison inmates

crossing off days
that are bare
on a cell wall,

slowly losing faith.

Widely published over many years in a variety of magazines, journals, anthologies and competitions. Reviews poems for the experience. Lives in a suburb of Preston with his wife, who is friend, critic, muse and editor.

Polly Walshe

Small Talk

As another year turns you realise you could
Fill a party with the dead:
Those you knew well, or half knew
Or used to recognise. You could

Offer them drinks, ask how they are,
Step back and watch them mix. Death
Has been kind to them, you’ll think,
Its chalky angled light shows what they are,

Lends them an innocence, casts
Their features in such sharp relief
They seem to be like angels –
How you’d guess angels are – a cast

Of being light but heavy, real
As only the most urgent prayer.
And they’re already over it,
You’ll overhear, the idea life was real

Instead of the pulsating vacancy
They knew before. Wonderful, they’ll say,
How it came back to them,
Like swimming without motion, a vacancy

One can’t really convey, or flying
Through bubbling blue hyperspace
As time flows down the hill and far away.
It’s so hard to explain. Just say like flying.

Polly Walshe was born in London and currently lives in Oxford. Her poems have recently been published in The Spectator, The Frogmore Papers, Snakeskin and in the Ver Poets prizewinners’ anthology (2020).