David Cherrett

Washing line

Death hangs in these old villages.
It billows up from time to time,
as laundered sheets do when it’s gusting.

These gusts cluster like buses; those buses
they no longer send to quiet
hillside stops like ours; cut off

the saline drip for such terminal
cases. Kinder, really, you see.
Let them go quietly. Besides

The young have mostly upped and gone
to bigger towns; found and lost
their for-the-weekend jobs.

And back home the laundry billows
once again; sheet-shrouds
blossom up. Two last month.

Each easing snuffs out memories.
The place meanwhile, retrenched,
has lost another smile of relevance.

David spends a lot of time in and writes from the Peak District. An
historian by education, he is particularly interested in the identity and relevance of the rural community as we enter the digital age.

Ren Chun Ho

fall sonnet

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
No thanks, in fact you don’t resemble
the sweating city under sun’s ray,
or swollen song of birds ensemble,

nor too the resting mist on wet cocoons,
or comfort from the silky beach sand
rolling from tightly curtained bedrooms
through my silent and awaiting hand.

I will admit I wonder whether we
pace the exhibits of a cold museum
or whether the already burning sea
must rest longer on healing alluvium –

So, I compare you to the day I remember.
In touch, inside the first rain of October.

Ren Chun Ho has published a collection of poetry, Shrines and Streetlights, with Ethos Books, and his work has been collected in the anthology A Luxury We Cannot Afford. He is a third-year politics and sociology student at the University of Cambridge, where he won the Brewer-Hall Poetry Prize 2017, and founded the Cambridge University Poetry and Prose Society.

Ken Taylor

New Beginnings

She was at a crossroad.
He was driving in unfamiliar territory.
Their eyes met
Brown and blue, blue and brown.

The moment passed in an instant.
He was still driving, but had met a guide,
She was still sitting, yet no longer alone.

Distance grew, yet time stood still.
Time passed, yet no distance grew.
Earth and sky, sky and earth.

She was in unfamiliar territory.
He was at a crossroads ..

When Ken Taylor was ten years old he
had a teacher with a love of stories and
verse whose enthusiasm was infectious:
she submitted one of his very first poems
to a BBC radio programme, where it was
read out for its descriptive portrayal of
nature. Some four decades later, detailed
observation and special experiences remain
the warp and weft into which he
embroiders his playful love of words.

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