Michael Jennings

Calling?

So close once – now I don’t know where you are.
Bonds that seemed so strong dissolved
by always leaving you until tomorrow.
Do you sometimes give me a thought?
occasionally resurrect old times,
each thought of me spaced longer
than the time before – a week, a month, a year?
And then today … It was the letter falling on the mat;
for a second it seemed to bear your handwriting.
The brief flutter of the heart was quickly stilled,
but in that moment I saw your face now no longer young;
your hair grey, your face lined, your eyes deep with mystery.
Was that mistaken glimpse of mine a prompt?
Could you be suffering and be needing my prayers?

Michael Jennings is an ex-cartographer, ex-teacher and failed novelist who became a Catholic in 1980 after twenty years of dithering. His poetry has been published in Acumen.

Joanna Boulter

Lament for Ivor Gurney

In youth, his song roved free.
The curve of a phrase
lifted a hill; notes, words
greening his spring.
Then the bugle sounded. And he
was called to his cadence.

syntax exploded
his meaning
mined and under
mined the slow fuse
thought itself
seismic his
sympathetic vibrations
shuddering to the
impact artillery’s
drum
tear at the
tattered ribbons
of membrane

to hear to speak
is impossible
now

He whose words and music
sang in perfect consonance
was untuned here, unstrung
from his true-pitched gamut

and what was done to him was beyond all saying.

His mind’s landscape pocked with shell-holes,
Severn running blood, the mists poisoned.
Yet even so, sometimes his shattered shire
miraculously made whole, for a day, an hour;
and his clear singing
poignant as a bird across a battlefield.

Ivor Gurney.                                        JOANNA BOULTER grew up in Wiltshire, Alfred’s Wessex, with a lifelong interest in poetry and music. She has three published pamphlets, and her collection Twenty Four Preludes And Fugues On Dmitri Shostakovich (Arc
Publications) was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection prize (2007).  As a consequence of which she was invited to write the libretto for Andrew Webb-Mitchell’s symphonic song-cycle Songs Of Awe And Wonder. Her second collection Blue Horse appeared in 2014 .

 

 

 

 

Jill Sharp

Brinkwells, August 1918

Elgar begins his concerto for cello

When the first leaf, without a breeze
or any sign of winter, wends a slow
spiralling fall to earth, and then another
drifts in long melancholy circles down
till soon a vast bewildered host
comes falling, falling from grace, how
can the listener not lament these
fallen, nor pity losses of his own?

Recalling time left fallow and unattended;
a scrape of earth held
in the palm; the truth
that all our names are writ in water?

Out of the well that once seemed dry springs
memory – a fathomless regret
too cold for remedy.

And though there’s nothing to be said –
no cure, no balm – no benediction –
mortal flesh only has so much strength
for grieving: must breathe, must raise its head.
And though we fail, here
are these strings, this bow.
And we have felt all this.
And we will go on feeling.

Jill’s poems have appeared in magazines including Envoi, Morning Star, Mslexia, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Frogmore Papers and The Interpreter’s House as well as online and in anthologies. She worked for many years as a tutor with the Open University and now lives in Swindon. The photo shows her standing on the Worcestershire Beacon in the Malvern Hills – Elgar country.

Archive