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).

Veronica Beedham

Church Going, March 2020
after Larkin

Now when the brick-red
doors are shut and Shannon
no longer sits outside
in her sky-blue sleeping bag
asking for change,

I wonder if by chance
one evening like this
I found myself
inside the emptiness
of nave and chancel

― no vespers or plainsong,
dust in the sacristy,
the only sound
wind on the roof tiles
or rain on high windows ―

whether I would recognise
the silence
that falls steadily
through the air
like sunlight through glass

as anything more or less
than what it is,
touched with an odour
of beeswax and incense;
something familiar

and ordinary,
like the old anxieties
of guilt and love.

Veronica Beedham grew up in Yorkshire, but has spent most of her life in the south of England
where for many years she taught English and European literature in schools and Sixth Form Colleges.
Although she wrote poems as a child and adolescent, she only took up writing seriously in 2005 after
an Arvon course in Scotland with Carol Ann Duffy. She won the Troubadour Prize in 2011 and the
Overton Prize in 2016. Her first pamphlet, A Sense of Place, was published in 2017.

Ged Groves

Easter 2020

Daffodils gather
in the sudden sunlight,
bees reach out,
the swallows are arriving
across an open sky.

We’re being quiet today,
we’re in retreat.

Maybe this world doesn’t need us ―
green moves over our absence
smooth as an eraser,
water lucidifies,
other animals step into our place,
though not into our shoes.

If we’re going to stay,
we must live more beautifully
on this beautiful earth.

It is Easter and the churches
are empty, and we
are being saved by angels,
who in their masks,
who in their love,
hold back our slipping
into darkness
with their crucified arms.

Ged Groves lives in North Yorkshire. For a long time he taught English Literature & Creative Writing, but doesn’t anymore. He has indepen-dently published four novels, a book of short stories and a volume of poetry. Over the years his work has appeared in a number of magazines, including Pennine Platform, Orbis and Outposts. He is currently compiling a new collection of poetry.