Guest Poem by Doreen Hinchliffe

Doreen is originally from Yorkshire but now lives in London. Her poems have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Mslexia, Poetry News, Magma, Orbis and Acumen. Publications include a novel, Sarabande in Blue, (Blossom Spring Publishing, 2020) and two poetry collections – Dark Italics, Indigo Dreams, 2017 and Substantial Ghosts, Oversteps Books, 2020. Her third poetry collection, Marginalia, was recently published by Stairwell Books. This poem is from Acumen 107.

In The Wind’s Singing

voices are in the wind’s singing
T. S. Eliot

The sound of the wind beneath the door
is nothing new, and yet tonight
I feel compelled to listen to its music.

It sings of a rickety stile, a gate that creaks
and fields where blackberries hang in clusters,
meandering over miles of dry stone walls.

I hear the drone of far-off bees and bluebottles,
the swish of a butterfly net and a sudden whoosh
of breath, scattering the fuzz on a dandelion clock.

Footsteps echo down a moonlit path
where hedgehogs snuffle in the undergrowth
and the call of a tawny owl bewitches.

Something more than memory is moving
under whispers of cicadas in the wild grass
enveloping the long-abandoned railway track.

Something deeper than history is stirring
in the rhythmic plop of pebbles skimmed on water,
the song of the sea in a beachcombed shell.