Presence 80

summer twilight . . .
ducks cross the road
with the shepherd

— K. Ramesh


a drop of milk
on the baby’s lips
falling star

— Meredith Ackroyd 


long ago war. . .
a child shows the way
through the minefield

— Kevin Valentine


father’s shoe shine kit
full of little tins
and brushes
how gently his hands
smoothed away abrasions

— Harriot West


on my way to lunch
I fall in with pilgrims
to Santiago
each one of us carries
his own hunger

— Bob Lucky


Levy

cemetery gate
off its hinges
snow-bowed broom

Uncle Nicodemus. Grandad Ira. You’d think we were a family of devout Christians, gathered each evening to read the Bible by candle light. Truth is, the men in our family worshipped coal: men who worked a mile underground,  stripped to the waist, who could read the future in the sigh of a pit prop and didn’t need a canary to gauge the air because they could taste firedamp and knew when to run; grafters who loved their pit ponies better than their wives, letting them nuzzle their shoulders and nibble the crusts from their snap, who dipped an onion in salt and ate it like an apple, and who died, like half the men in our street, before the age of forty five.

old workings
the sump water’s
algal bloom

— Julie Mellor