Christopher Southgate

Swifts

Watched over the Lyon river
On our honeymoon
Watched around the Galata Tower in Istanbul
And in their busy, hurtling dance
Here at Carcassonne, against this film-set
Of Visigothic towers that interrupt
The sun.

Swifts have been mascots
Of our love, and like our love
Fly with one half of their brains
Even when the other half sleeps.
And they are always looking, looking
For next prey, as we have looked hungrily
For the world.

One day
Swifts will roost and close their wings
Let it not be soon.

Christopher Southgate lives on the edge of Dartmoor. His latest book of poetry is Rain Falling by the River (Canterbury Press). He has also published a series of collections with Shoestring Press, the most recent being Chasing the Raven. He teaches at the University of Exeter.

Duncan Forbes

Natura Naturans

How do you capture the rapture
and zing of the spring each year
in a new new chapter
without the clichés ricocheting?
There’s blossom blossoming everywhere:
apple, prunus, peach and pear –
let’s name the colours black on white:
lemon yellow Forsythia
and all those eager daffodils
trumpeting to their yellow fellows,
the blue, the Hallelujah blue,
of hyacinths and grape hyacinths too;
magnificent magnolias
in vernal and perennial bloom
redeem suburbia again.
The salad colours of spring leaves
unfurl into a new-made world.
It’s Eden here, an earthly paradise,
of chlorophyll and photosynthesis.
The vermilion of the tulip head
emerges from its bright red bud.
The cherry blossom on the trees
opens its petals of cerise.
The cherry and the kerria,
the more in mind the merrier,
the sing-song of the birdsong,
the blackbird and its spring-song,
the alleluia chorus euphoric at the dawn.
I am the resurrection and the life,
says every green and knowledgeable leaf.
The fizz, the fuzz on firs and trees,
the dots of pointillistic buds,
the bluebell and wild garlic woods,
how can mere herds of lettered words
denote the world where spring occurs?
And black notation marks like these
in mimicry of scattered seeds
how can they hope to symbolise
the multi-coloured spending sprees
of nature nurturing its breeds?

His poems have won a Gregory Award and First Prize in the TLS/ Blackwells Competition. His work has also been widely published in journals, magazines and anthologies as well as being broadcast on radio both in the UK and the US. A selection was included by Faber in Poetry Introduction 5. He has read his poems at over 50 venues and at various literary festivals. He has judged poetry prizes and run creative writing groups.
He has lectured on, and taught, literature and History of Art.

Briege Duffaud

2020

Right from the start the TV news
resembled Sci-fi books I used to read
by torchlight under blankets
breathless at events unthinkable
in my feather-pillowed wool-warmed Convent world.
The Kraken rose from suntan-friendly waves,
Martians blow-torched London.
That was fiction.

Truth then was our First Communion quiz:
Who made the world? God made the world
for His own glory, Man’s use and benefit.

It came with warnings though: The fire next time.
We thought that was a metaphor,
forgetting how he drowned the whole place once
in a vengeful tantrum, with far less cause
than Man’s misuse of His creation.
That was fiction, maybe.

Truth now seemed a while
to be that kangaroo poised like the last dinosaur
against red sky, black bones of houses.

We thought: the future?
Till green leaves began to sprout
from torched trees and ashy earth
like the olive twig an optimistic dove
gifted to Noah.
Then someone ate a pangolin
or dropped a test-tube in a lab, whatever ….
Can fiction better that?

Briege Duffaud is Northern Irish but most of her adult life has been spent in England and France. She has worked as a freelance journalist before publishing two novels and a short story collection. She has been writing poetry since 2016. She lives in South-West London.