Dan Wyke
Christmas Day
We are alone, say the stars,
though we have stood here so often,
necks craned, as if hard of hearing,
that we don't really feel it.
The chalk lane gives off its own light,
frost crystallizes the grass verge,
furs the fence posts,
behind which horses stand,
in no relation to each other,
snorting, stamping on the iron mud,
engines of flesh, ticking over,
breath flowering
from the twin exhausts of their nostrils.
Love of life, I think,
is a love of its particulars,
but sometimes the mind,
as though it had a mind of its own,
adventures into the vast, dark emptiness,
thinking it might still find...
- it knows not what.
Our cigarettes' small coals
arrange a constellation,
then another, and another,
until each, in their own time,
goes out.
For a while longer we forget the cold
by picking out patterns
in the firmament - the milk pan,
the-bed-with-pillows, the fork -
emblems of the everyday.
Then we go inside.
(Only, a thought stays behind -
stubborn, unsatisfied, staring up at
the designs which seem unfathomable
and deliberate.)
Page(s) 18-19
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The