Adrian Atterbury
Time
Cold and cloudless thoughts
Turn the season, pull the lever
And slide, fighting all the way,
A last, cold drop of starlight
Dripping into the vein of our time,
And all of life drinks its last,
Weathering the eye-opened silence,
The grey, whispered wisdom
Of the end of things,
A cup of everything tipped golden
Into the soil of an indifferent world.
Autumn, brown and gathering
Smiles, and roots gripping tight
Tired and strong against the breaking force,
A time for goodbyes and running for dear life,
And wondering regrets
Hidden in a fruit of evening,
Hanging red and fading
With the last of the sun.
A strange kind of summer,
With rain, and a sunshine breeze,
And the rainbow, childhood light
Of years in our eyes,
The dancing, greengrass bubbles of days
Kiss away and burst on the skin of youth,
And the tear-dappled pools of all our lives
Form across the meadowed fields of memory
And drown, silver and struggling
The muscles that held onto time.
Laughter wakes into the world,
Falling like rain and running in streams,
Wetting with sunlight
The stretched and sinning ground,
And breathing thorough, coursing life
Through the branches of everything.
Bone-weary sinews surge green in blood,
And the heart of the world thumps, just once,
Big and slow enough to matter,
A great and thunderous weaving
Of gossamer tapestries,
And miracles light as thoughts.
Page(s) 72
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