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'Poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance.'
 
Matthew Arnold
Veronica Aaronson 

What Remains Unspoken

Yes, it was me who cleared 
my throat on that hot June day
as we pulled into the platform,
said the man in the worsted suit.
The sun had layered light with dust 
magicked her shape into being,
as it had been the hour of our parting –
dress bright as a buttercup,
hair drawn back from her face,
eyes misted to an unfamiliar blue.
She pressed a letter into my pocket.

I saw her place the letter in his pocket,
said the station clock.
It was the bright sunshine dress 
that caught my attention, 
so at odds with how they were; 
their fingers lingered, parted only
when arms ran out of stretch,
eyes kept contact until
time and space overtook them.

She waited too long for his reply,
said the picket fence.
I heard she married Tom Brackley, 
the post mistress’s son.

The steam couldn’t comment, 
it had been lost to the air, unlike
the flavour of their unspoken words 
which still clings to the brickwork, 
is stored in the memory
of the willow and meadowsweet
around Adlestrop.

When everything’s quiet
it doesn’t mean 
nothing’s happening,
said the poet’s ghost.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ian Royce Chamberlain

Ebb
We sat through the tide

watched the ebb and listened
heard the last thin trickle
of her breath  
 
waited for the turn but knew
 
She’s gone, my sister said
not a time to smile but we did
in a shaky kind of gratitude
for easiness
 
for the flat calm drift of her release
 
Out there
where the detail deltas into mist
and the sea herself is sleeping, there
is a hard-cropped horizon
 
flat and finite as the line across her screen
 
No barriers, no dam
she always said she’d put up no resistance
feared abandonment in jaggedness
some rockpool fetid with decay
 
content she was with a quiet emptying
 
While we
like shoreline kids with salty eyes
ran up and down the beach discovering
her footprints were
 
unaffected by the tide
​_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jennie Osborne
FIRST TO BLINK
 
And on the rain-slick road in front of me
white-staring     staring me down
daring me down    not moving
luminous in the moment   in the car headlight
forty-mile-an-hour moment
flower-face    feather-face
saucer-starer    Blodeuwedd
taking me in
taking my lethal metal jacket in
and not moving     facing me down
claw gripping carcase
pinning me down
 
         till I blink   brake   swerve
         into the risk of oncoming
 
lifts upward like a leaf
letting go of gravity
curd of mist
of white ash
dissolving to night     to drizzle
blurring to peripheral
 
talons ungrasped
letting me run
leaving me smeared
furred and bloody
on the road

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Graham Burchell

TWO MINUTES SILENCE 

At school a boy was allowed to climb the caretaker’s ladder, 
clamber to a classroom’s flat roof, step carefully to a corner,
test his vertigo, and wait, trumpet in hand. 

The chill snatched his trouser legs, pulled his hair, tugged 
a colder place inside while a hush happened and watches 
were checked. The headmaster’s was the only one that counted.

Like a bird in a tree and one on the ground each eyed the other,
until the tension would stretch no further. 
An exaggerated nod: a hand gesture, and the boy blew,

slipped and slid around the first haunts of The Last Post
until he calmed and his breath brassed music; a sad calling
that stunned even the most unruly child into a chess pawn 

on a plain grey board, ground, that for two minutes
would lose its play. It had stiffened – stiffened tighter
when a far off canon underscored. Imagine all their thoughts 

spooling from a fax machine in the secretary’s office 
for the adults to read about how much so many had yet 
to learn of inner reflection, life and its Chinese burns.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________