OS5 Jan-Feb 2024

Christian Ward

Watching the Hale-Bopp Comet With My Father 

Car parked, we slid ourselves 
under a blanket of countryside 
to watch the comet unlock

the night sky. Though warmed 
by hot chocolate, the atmosphere 
in the car was colder than Hale-Bopp’s

icy tail. Silence between us 
seemingly vast like the distance 
it travelled. No crosswords 

or newspapers to dilate the time. 
After it crossed the solar system, 
I expected little to change. 

By the time we returned home, 
it felt like you were on Pluto 
and I was still stuck on Earth, 
trying to find something grounded 
to keep us together.

How to eat your own head 

Start by learning to eat the clouds:
Tilt your head all the way back,
mouth open like a fish beginning 
for repentance before the blade hits. 
Channel a childhood fear inside 
the vortex chamber of your chest.
Let it rip like a scene from a Stephen 
King novel. You’ll accumulate 
a year’s rain in thirty seconds flat.
After this, eating your own head 
will be as easy as munching on a piano.
You’ll be able to unscrew the skull
with the minimum of fuss. Have 
temporary company for the telly.
An involuntary therapist. Model 
those looks you were always afraid of.
And, when it’s time to feast, feel free
to ignore it weeping as it goes down the chute
of your throat. Be warned: a flock
of canaries might emerge after it’s done,
your loved one’s face stuck in permanent 
disbelief like a frog caught in a pike’s jaws,
a missed sign you always thought was luck. 

Christian Ward is a UK-based poet with new work forthcoming in Acumen, Spelt, Dream Catcher, and Dreich. He was longlisted for the 2023 Aurora Prize for Writing, shortlisted for the 2023 Ironbridge Poetry Competition and 2023 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and won the 2023 Cathalbui Poetry Competitions

Leslie Sheills

Emergency instructions

In the unlikely event of a sudden unscheduled manifestation
REMAIN CALM!
Symbols will be released from above your head.
Place them over your face and think normally.
Staff will move among you to assist in
fervent warmth and intensity of feeling
and dry tears.
They will take into protective custody your memories.
They will take into protective custody your dreams.
…
You may if you look out of the window see a
faint blue light.
DO NOT view it directly,
but filter it safely through the special protective prejudice
which has been issued to you.
…
You may experience some turbulence.
When the instruction “BRACE, BRACE!” is heard,
you know we will shortly be arriving.
Do not attempt to place your head between your knees,
but at all costs,
protect your heart.

Leslie Sheills: a musician and teacher who was born in Liverpool, has lived in South Africa, and who now lives on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales. A failed painter, and drunk with the beauty of this place, I try to paint with words…

Jonathan Ukah

I stared at the top of the mountain,
and felt that eternity would reject me;
and throw me under the cranky crane;
My sister was sitting on a sky wire like a bird;
she believed I had closure believing she existed;
my elder brother saw the bottom of the sea
and knew how cruel the waves were,
after crushing his ribs to build our fence,
whenever it rained glass here.
My mother was the first to realise it,
that dreams were wrong road maps,
leading us in circles and cycles,
until the loop of the labyrinth closes in on us
and we become wise by screaming at the moon.

But it’s true what my brother says,
that dreams are a river flowing invisibly,
through half-death, hurtling silence,
where there is a stone of success
to sharpen the knife of truth
into the anvil of laughter or lies
told in the wake of our obsession.
When the road is lonely and dark,
trees line up at its edge,
rain falls like stones dropping,
we dream that the sun will soon shine.
If it’s of comfort, we hear birds chirping,
flowers whispering, the boos of the wind,
then we feel the truth is slowly disappearing,
like yesterday’s rain on a dry floor.

Jonathan Ukah: Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2024 Edition, Jonathan Ukah’s poems have been widely featured in literary magazines and anthologies. He is the recipient of the Alexander Pope Poetry Award of The Pierian 2023. He is a second runner-up at the Wingless Dreamer Publisher Poetry Contest 2022.

Heather Cook

A Different Darkness

I never feel afraid
alone in this soft darkness.
The fading light
brings mysteries:
glowing toadstool caps,
resin jewels that capture
unseen rays to twinkle,
pale grey mermaid hair
hanging from an unseen branch.

The wood is small,
hemmed in by roads
where sirens scream
and flattened corpses
greet the dawn.

Stand strong, great gentle trees,
to guard this precious peace
and slow down time.

Heather Cook: I have always loved poetry and since retirement have made the most of the extra time available, daring to put my head above the parapet to enter a number of competitions. I have been placed or shortlisted in several, including: Buxton, Wildfire Words, Writing Magazine and Ver Poets Ten Liners competitions.

Phil Wood

A Winter Walk Along The Wye

How much life labours over knowing stuff,
lingers in pages with sums of kneeling chore.
I dither with my gods. I’m free, but lame from doubt.

The fearless river lifts a leaf from mud.
Why did I cling to books? My hands are cold.
I’ve a blister on my foot. A sort of knowing?

Phil Wood studied English Literature at Aberystwyth University. He has worked in statistics, education, shipping, and a biscuit factory. He enjoys chess and learning German. His writing can be found in various places, including : Gwyllion, Ink Sweat and Tears and a featured collaboration with photographer John Winder at Abergavenny Small Press.

Yvonne Crossley

The Chattering Trees

Every day the beech branches,
outside my window,
are charmed by noisy finches;
gold and red-feathered heads darting,
twittering and gossip gathering.
Do they even listen to each other?

From my viewpoint, I hear
indecipherable tweets and chirps;
sentences with no structure and no end.
Breakfast, noon and tea,
they congregate for a blether,
whatever the weather crow says.

Sometimes they flitter and swoop
to other perches, in other gardens,
including mine, and I wonder about their news –
their very social conversations,
without deletions or expectations,
without media censorship.

How wonderful to see birds are still free
to chatter amiably in the trees.

Yvonne Crossley currently resides in Wiltshire and is inspired by natural history, self-reflection and the wonder of words. Her recent work can be found in e-zines: Wildfire Words, Littoral Magazine, You Tube Poetry Archive Now! 2023, Haiku in Leaf Journal issue 2 and Cranborne Chase Words in the Landscape poetry competition category winner.

David Birch

On a Dartmoor Track

A twist of heather
grafted in a crease of granite
deflects the grind of boots
and glance of hooves.

Stubborn roots cling on barely,
suck wiry strength
from the faintest skim of dirt.

An end of autumn pallor
tints the purple edges
of the brittle hooded blooms, ready
for the trial of swaling and ice:
autumn fire and winter frost,
before the fading year’s last bow.

Early Morning, Culm Valley

The settled mist is a straight edge,
its own horizon, rulered,
sharper than the severed
hillside against the sky,
where dazzled fields stretch out
above the clouds on the valley floor.

Here, the trees are muffled
and the standing water 
is brighter than it should be,
as if holding yesterday’s light.

The hedges loom,
dark and sudden;
the edge of a barn,
all rough-sided cob,
emerges, its breadth
only hinted at
in the disconcerting morning’s breath.

Over the Hedge

Over the hedge
from where you lived
your ashes lie under Dartmoor granite.

Over the hedge
we peer discreetly
to catch a glimpse
of your garden.

Over the hedge
the scent of sweet peas
stirs the memory
of a daughter’s wedding.

Over the hedge
the lane to the moor
climbs and winds
towards the distant tors.

David Birch worked in education and lives in Devon. His poems, several of which have been published in Wildfire Words, often explore the relationship of people and their landscape.

David Ashbee

Little Coombe

It was always hard to see the factory
that sprawled along the valley
where steam-train smoke-plumes blossomed
60 years ago,

but nowadays we can see the ranks
of many-coloured boxes
rising up the hillside, holding hands
in a confectionery display.

The boastful rampant factory,
smithereened to let
sunlight spread and twinkle
on a resurrected river

is out of mind entirely
for this new-spawned generation
laughing in the playpark
as if dancing on its grave.

David Ashbee has been part of the Gloucestershire poetry scene since taking over the running of a poetry and music group in Dursley in 1974. Since then he has published 3 collections and read at Cheltenham Literature Festival. This year he judges the GWN competition.

Lorna Rose

Bird

Written at Hawbrush Community Gardens, Brierley Hill

The fire is burning up its secrets into white ashes,
making charcoal to paint pictures with,
so nothing is ever really gone,
only transformed.
Of course you live as if no one ever dies,
until they do,
it’s too much otherwise.

But this is the remedy,
sunlight cascading through the orange
and yellowed rivers of snakeskin leaves,
robins elegantly chatting the morning away together,
reminding me of that one that came so close to us that summer
and we both knew it was special.
Every time I see one,
that flash of fluffed red and delicate beauty,
there you are
and it wounds me softly.

Like when I carried that baby pigeon home
and the warmth of its belly,
the fragility of its bones,
felt like my heart was right there in my hands,
needing bread and honey and mother feathers.
I knew it wasn’t going to make it,
I knew and I hoped anyway,
there’s no point otherwise.

Remember,
the way raindrops drip through
the veins of nasturtium leaves
is how the heart works,
what it beats for.

Love is the taste of nature’s sugar on your tongue,
while magpies turn their curious eyes in search of shining treasure.
Contentment is slipping on mud as you traverse tiny mountains,
not giving a damn about the state of your clothes.
Hope is dying in the embers,
to glow golden and rise phoenix-like,
fearless and ready to fly again.

Dear Gaia

I give it back to you,
bury the dead of me in your deep red soil.
Hand back what helped me grow then broke me,
so I grew higher
towards the sun,
grateful for the dark and the gift of its rebirth.
Not pulling my light back in,
lest it be eaten by spite,
hiding my burning heart in the shadows,
where cannibal hunger can’t find it.
I bloom without permission,
I thrive in your endlessness,
I create myself from my true mother.
Look,
I have become what you always intended,
a force to be reckoned with as I bend,
a goddess who knows forever is fleeting,
so eats the world slowly, gently, with reverence,
then hands it back.

Lorna Rose is a Birmingham based actor, poet and podcaster. She has performed her work at Ledbury, Glastonbury and Moseley Folk Festivals. Her debut collection ‘Caterpillar Soup’ is out with Verve Poetry Press in March. You can listen to her work here:https://soundcloud.com/lornarosepoet.

Annie Ellis

Surfing with Wings

Standing on the board
she had me rippling on a leaf green sea.

Her slender body took my weight,
ready to skim the waves.

Her thighs held my feet
so I can push at her bidding.

Feeling strength between veins
her wings big as sails
collect the wind,
turning and tilting me in the spray,

lifting me to the sky.

Annie Ellis bio.

John Poolman

The Homecoming

There was a day last autumn
When I came home, just as the sun was setting.
The geese were calling in the garden.
They came towards me as I made my way
Up to what once had been their orchard.
I opened the yard gate
To give them food and water.
Homecoming for me now will always be
An autumn day with calling geese.

After the Funeral

The widowed earth
Cries out today
For warmth and comfort
Under the snow’s blanket.
But frost and cold
Will show no mercy
And leave her mourning,
Weeping without hope.

John Poolman: I am a priest of the Church in Wales, retired from parochial ministry but involved in helping prepare those in training for future ministries. My background is in the agricultural industry I am among the first generation of my family not to have been a farm worker.

Julie Didcock-Williams

On understanding a marriage

For twenty years, I walked towards the lime tree
standing at the crossroads and didn’t see it:
I mistook it for beech.

And for twenty years, I walked towards you
waiting in the church aisle and couldn’t find you
among the relatives, the guests, the cake.

And for twenty years, I reached out for you
lying on the bed’s edge and couldn’t feel you
as the smoke of your body drifted away.

And for twenty years, I sat down next to you
in the restaurant and couldn’t taste you,
as the food you ordered was only for one.

And for twenty years, I yelled for help from you
cooking in the kitchen and couldn’t hear your response
over the cake mixer whirling as you baked your cake.

And then that year, I walked towards the lime tree
still standing at the crossroads and I looked up, stopped
walking and I started seeing and I saw.

Julie Didcock-Williams‘ work has featured in publications such as Wildfire-Words, Blithe Spirit and Cider Press Review and alongside Paul Jackson’s artworks in WING Gallery, Wadhurst, East Sussex. She has a Masters in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London. She lives in rural East Sussex where the landscape inspires her work.

Rebecca Klassen

Paper Lullaby

She reads the words aloud from the bed warmth in the dim lamplight,
her voice familiar to their foetus,
reverberating muffled syllables below her diaphragm,
relaying messages from Daddy, home in a year.
His lilting letters that have crossed oceans to lull their unborn child,
all the way from the chaos of roaring bombs and missiles.
There is no mention of these things in his letters,
just his anticipation to hold his family.
But she has decided that she will cradle and rock him.
When he returns,
while their baby sleeps,
she’ll stroke his hair,
pat his back,
and tell him everything will be okay.

Rebecca Klassen is co-editor of The Phare. Her work has featured in Mslexia, Shooter, Popshop, Burningword, Barren, Ellipsis Zine, Borderless, The Drabble, and The Wild Word. She has won the London Independent Story Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Laurie Lee Prize. Rebecca’s work has been performed at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Stroud Book Festival, and on BBC Radio. 
https://bex350.wixsite.com/rebecca-klassen

David McVey

Two Haiku for Jack

Jack, Connemara,
dark bay coat, mealy muzzle.
Strong, silent watcher.

I graze Jack in hand.
He tears at the fresh spring grass.
We trace a green poem.

David McVey lectures at New College, Lanarkshire. He has published over 120 short stories and a great deal of non-fiction that focuses on history and the outdoors. He enjoys hillwalking, visiting historic sites, reading, watching telly, and supporting his home-town football team, Kirkintilloch Rob Roy FC.

Estill Pollock

Headlands

The lighthouse—spiral tenement
for roughneck keepers, grubbing veg
in rows the seabirds reinvent
as bolt holes for their chicks to fledge,
all, perched on rocky outcrops, where
the washing drapes an old deck chair.

The garden fence, a ribcage clutch
of stunted cabbages and leeks,
of mouldy straw bales for the hutch
they never used—now, no one speaks
of rabbits or the stew, without
a look of existential doubt.

The boat home—not for weeks, except
a passing trawler, signalling
the sea is gales, the mate inept,
but then, what else is new: the ring
of mirrored light rotates, its arc
a paradox of light and dark.

Patriots

A dogma, like a rocking horse—
admired as decoration, but
a poor bet on a muddy course
with bolters that had made the cut,
or so they thought, before some geek
with bugs declassified the weak.

The voter bloc turned Right, and Right
again, and compass needles spun
for air, at rallies in the night
where grudges strutted with a gun.
Bipartisans with fat cigars
were done—now, gospel Stars and Bars.

A subsequent analysis
concluded dark web Übermensch
the cause, but symptoms are the kiss-
and-tell of straw polls, when the inch
became a mile. The courts agreed:
the rot prefigured in the seed.

Estill Pollock‘s publications include Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg) and the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press, Wales). His recent poetry collections, Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark and Heathen Anthems, are published in the United States by Broadstone Books. An e-chapbook, And Then, is published by Mudlark. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Derek Healy

Bookcase Building

It’s so exact:
each white melamine board
fits snugly
onto dowels and bolts
with just a push;

shelf brackets slide into
pre-drilled holes,
delicate but strong,
fit for a weight
they’ll bear without bowing:

ready now
for a lifetime’s books
to colour them.
It’s here the challenge starts –
what goes where?

How to order them
so that they flow
one theme to another,
fit the space
yet leave room to grow?

Hour after hour
I try, then try again,
till at last
they tell the story
that suits them best.

Rosie’s Room

(to Rosie Rae, an Edwardian maid of all work)

In my garret at the top of the house,
all morning I’ve cleaned the narrow fireplace
that three long winters warmed your worked-red flesh –
before the world you knew went up in smoke.
My fingers, nails black rimmed now, reek of ash
from coals you set alight then watched grow faint –
the last remains of fossilised remains,
mantling old firebricks like a Roman floor.

You can’t have guessed an old man would sit here
one far-away day, surrounded by books
where you’d laid your head and read your Bible.
Still less that he’d be writing about you,
wondering what you dreamed of here at night;
where you disappeared when the bells fell silent.

Derek Healy was born and raised in Cheltenham, but now lives across the Severn Vale in Malvern. His third collection (Uncharted, Graffiti Books) was launched at the 2022 Cheltenham Poetry Festival.  He has appeared in a number of journals, in the UK and USA, and has often read at the Cheltenham Literature Festival.

Suzanna Fitzpatrick

Skeleton Luge

Lying face down
on the massage bed, I wait
to be ironed out.

Her slender fingers
smooth me, seek the enigma
buried in my back.

I think I know it,
but the hurt is somewhere else.
She homes in on pain –

murmurs at my flinch
and presses, her insistence
loosening my knot.

Startled, I teeter
on my body’s glacier,
feel the spreading thaw

of a lifetime’s ice
over my thighs, buttocks, breasts,
meltwater rising

to my mind, hungry
for her hands to stray, tip me
right over the edge.

Suzanna Fitzpatrick (she/her) is a bisexual poet widely published in magazines and anthologies. She came third in the 2023 Shepton Snowdrops Competition, second in the 2016 Café Writers Competition, and won the 2014 Hamish Canham Prize. Pamphlets from Red Squirrel Press: Fledglings (2016), Crippled (2024) @suzannafitzpat

Tracey Hope

Decomposition in Soil

Litter

Awd Man sucks dirt
from his fingernails

he weeps
Child has gone

gone has Child 
has Child gone

wind weaves
a carnival

paper bone plastic
a deadly procession

Fibric

Man falls
feathered

an earth bound
Icarus

embeds deep
unobserved

leaf twig bone
top pull bag

he ploughs
horizons

Hemic

Woman unwound
bone crumbles

shreds of text
faded shards

rot and bind
matrix to matter

a netted lattice
spreads deep

she mourns
for all that is lost

Sapric

Child is buried
with yarrow

no candles
no bells

a memory
of green grass

all is still
all is silent

but for the beating
of Earth’s pure core

Tracey Hope is a powerful new voice in contemporary poetry whose debut pamphlet, Myther, won the prestigious Cerasus Poetry Prize 2024. Her poems have featured in Wildfire Words, Orbis, Erbacce and The Lake. She won a reader award in Orbis and was shortlisted for the annual Erbacce prize. Tracey completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. www.traceyhope.com

Judith van Dijkhuizen

After the Gig

We tune our instruments,
plug ourselves in,
check the sound,

warm up with a few tunes,
see the music as if through a window,

climb out,
polka across snow-crowned mountains,
swoop to play jigs
among the dancing sparks of rivers.
twist up, sprinkling notes,
waltz high above the forests.

Afterwards, we load our gear into the car,
drive home.
Days later, the window closes,
the glass dulls.

Judith van Dijkhuizen has been published in anthologies and in magazines. She has read at Cheltenham Literature Festival after winning the GWN competition, and some of her poems have been broadcast on local radio.

Sharon Webster

Applause

Let’s dance in the meadows
in the dew light, 
and hug the trees.
Puff up steep,
sheep dusted hills, 
plunge into the playful froth
of the sea.
Let’s loiter,
scuff our heels
disturb the shady banks.
Or reclining
on silken mounds
of amber green,
contemplate the scudding sky,
the sun, the moon, the stars.
Revel in the chorus, 
the simplicity
each splendour 
before us.

Because to save this earth,
we must truly love it first.

Sharon Webster lives in Cheltenham and writes mainly poetry and short fiction. Her first anthology ‘Shadows and Daisies’ was published in 2023 by Tim Saunders.

Elizabeth Davies

Memento Mori

The mottled brown feather standing
in a turquoise glass pot on my desk
was not plucked from a goose’s breast
or picked by a child from a muddy bank,
but a gift from a French friend pleased
to be taken to the Tower.

The soft plume running down
to a quill and its gold nib
seems the kind that might once have
signed a warrant in a stone room
above the flint of Tower Hill.
This feather waits patiently that I
might one day scratch out in old ink
A poem to the poor bird’s passing.

Elizabeth Davies is an academic public health doctor at King’s College London. She began publishing ‘tales’ from her medical training in 1999 and writing poetry in 2004 during a Commonwealth Harkness Fellowship in Boston. Elizabeth’s poems have been shortlisted or commended in Southbank Poetry, Poetry Kit, Hippocrates, and Sentinel Literary Prizes. She has presented at medical conferences on the potential role of poetry in palliative care, contributed to PN Review, and published poems in several magazines and anthologies.

Beverley Duguid

Grief

When you think
you’ve forgotten
they come back.
Tide upon tide of grey mist
over my head and heart.
I didn’t know they could still love
but in the dream they said,
we do
and love carries on until we meet again.
Others love too those you never knew.
My dream – profound
gave me a renewed sense of joy.
I was not alone.
Somewhere an invisible hand
strokes mine,
calls my name, in comfort,
as only you did.
Hums songs only we knew the rhythm to
remembers me,
and all I did.

Beverley Duguid is a researcher, writer and historian. Themes of  heritage, loss (in all its guises), journeys and travel inform her poems.

Brenda Henderson

The Last Sound

The gift of hearing is the last to go at the end of life

The light falling on the counterpane tells me yet another day is here,
a precious gift I always thought, but now one day runs into another.
The pristine sheet, hard tucked in, shows I have not moved,
hides the bedsores and warmth-cooling piss beneath.
I see my twitching hands lying sallow, blue,
the only part of me to move unaided.
Death sits quietly at my side,
my only visitor now.

We have become quite intimate.
‘Do you remember?’ She smiles.
‘Pony rides? That dreadful fall?’
She was there then, always there,
always around; a friend,
not just an acquaintance.

The nursing home is silent.
At least, I do not hear
the cries I know are there
for help that never comes;
cries I no longer make.
The family have been
and gone,
‘Paid their last respects’,
people I no longer know,
the young grown strangers.

Death helps me breathe,
easing the rattle,
each breath a tiny gift.

She gets up.
I rise to follow.

And a robin sings…

Coda

Nurses chirp sparrow-like behind doors
waiting
while white hands flutter still
on dove-white counterpane.

Brenda Henderson delights in making creative connexions, a new Renaissance woman. She self-published Jewels and More Jewels in the 1990s becoming part of the Bristol slam Poetry scene and starting the first poet’s ezine The Snowball Tree. Now living in France, she ran the Pen Nib poetry writing competition. Currently on the ‘Poetry Now’ course with Dr Carrie Etter. She is putting on a Franco /English  reading as part of ‘Le printemps des poètes’ initiative. Facebook Brenda Henderson Corgnac La Maison des Couleurs.

Anna Mindel Crawford

Nail Scissors

Today they fitted the syringe driver. Finally, you sleep
cheeks sinking around your open mouth, murmuring
 
help me from morphine laden dreams. Locked inside
the bathroom I breathe. And search for some comfort
 
within the cabinet. New soap. Aftershave, deodorant
still to be finished, and buried between them, blunt

old nail scissors, things your hands will never hold
again. If I twist my back from the door, I can see us

thirty years ago, my small fingers resting in yours,
thick, slow, and callused, your work-worn clothes

weighting your shoulders down into an arch around
me, scent of stale sweat and nicotine filling my nose.

You ease the levers together to create a gentle snap,
releasing tiny white ghosts into the silence between us.

Anna Mindel Crawford lives in West London and works as a Learning and Development Partner at the University of West London. She has had poems published by Visual Verse and in City Lit’s annual anthology Between the Lines. She was first prize winner of the Clevedon Literary Festival 2023 Open Poetry Competition.

David Willis

Cardiac Arrest

My heart is there,
it beats, in my ribbed chest
to circulate warm blood,
red corpuscles, platelets
not to be constrained by
insipid affectations of love.

Only to give painted colour 
in my fingers and toes, but,
not to sing in a strange choir
that fluster-rouges my cheeks
when we,
as prospective lovers’ meet.

David Willis attained a Masters in Creative Writing and was awarded The Ictus Prize for Poetry in 2022 aged 66. He has written articles for Cumbria Police and Age Concern amongst other publications and ezines. Published on The Guardian obituary page and in Northern Gravy and Wildfire Words as a poet. He has since been longlisted by Butcher’s Dog and Bad Betty Press. Accepted by Dreich for publication next May, 2024.

Carol Sheppard

Potato

How easily the knife slips under fleshy skin
revealing white undersides.
Skin speckled with liver spots.
And it reminded me of you.  At the end.
When, at last, you had been felled,
the might oak of the family.
Your hand gripped mine,
tissue paper skin, bruised blue.
And for the first time ever, I heard
You utter ”I’m scared”.
I couldn’t look at your face,
studied your hand instead,
counting spots like dying stars.
“You’ll be ok”, I whispered back,
my fingers clasped round yours.
But I was afraid too.

Carol Sheppard dwells in the beautiful Forest of Dean. She can’t decide whether to write poetry or plays so writes both. Her poetry is imagistic and inspired by the landscape and people around her.

Gerald Seniuk

Life

The story evolves, engages, and reaches a satisfying climax. 
The joke is gentle, subtle, and everyone feels better, lighter.
Relaxed.
 
The sunrise gains lumens imperceptibly, washing the East in pink and blue, then joyously illumines the sky in bright orange, shouting.
 
The day begins to end with another light display, fiery red, then orangey gray that shades off to mauve, then purple, then slides into something dark, eventually opening pink on the other side of time, and yesterday links to today.
 
Another story unfolds. I have been here before. I have heard this, or something very similar. The same storyteller?  Or someone else, telling the same story in a novel voice? I listen, for I am gentle, subtle, and light, like the joke.
 
The sky is dirty, gassed, and too fouled for laughter. Bad people, especially brute men laugh, not lightly at gentle jokes, but coarsely, cruelly at pain, at shame.
 
Good people — men, women, children, the old, the infirm, the trained, the ignorant, the skilled and unskilled, fools and addicts, the dying, the weak, the needy – do what they can.
But really?
 
The sky fights back against us, doing what it can, cleaning itself, and waiting for when humanity will awaken. But humanity sleeps deep into a dream. A dream is not a story. A dream cannot save, salve, or make a bad story go away.
 
The sunrise is basic today, default light grey sky to blueish background. White wisps appear from nowhere and float happily away, sometimes just disappearing into the blue. Later the good clouds unite, cleaning the sky, the land, and us with gentle rain. Dark clouds also come, and bring pain. They have come before, they will come again, strong and mean.
 
So here we are my friend, too young to see how it will end and too old to start again. We journey, one step at a time.
You smile at me. I begin another story. You tell a gentle joke.

Gerald Seniuk is retired, and resides in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.

This is the prompt for entries to Open Submissions 5

As usual, we were looking for writing on your own choice of theme that grabs our attention, pulls our heart strings, leaves us open-mouthed or holding our breath, makes us think, make us laugh or cry, and/or is strikingly original. In short, poems or flash-fiction that excite us enough to share them with wildfire words readers.

During this submission window, each writer may make one submission as a single file containing a maximum of 3 items — poems and/or flashes. Each item can be in any form, but no longer than 80 lines including title, stanza breaks, dedication or footnotes.
You are also invited to supply a biography of yourself in no more than 50 words, If any of your work is published, your writing “bio” will be, too.
We encourage you to make an audio recording of each item on your phone or computer and send it with your text, or after your poem has been published.
Or you can join one of our regular online recording sessions.

Submitted writing must be your own original work, in English, and unpublished in print or online, including your own website. Where an original writer teams up with a translator into English, we will consider publishing the work, provided biographies of both writer and translator are provided.

If your work is published in wildfire words ezine, it will be on a non-exclusive basis for at least one year. The copyright remains yours for all poems, flash, bios, and audio recordings you submit for publication.

How we decide which poems to publish

Our decisions on whether to publish an item are not anonymous. We see the writer’s bio with the poetry or flash. Published authors have generally set a quality benchmark which we can use to gauge their new work. The work of writers with little published work is assessed on quality and potential. In such cases, we may contact the writer to suggest some tweaks that would make us keen to share the work on Wildfire Words.

We do not charge for submissions — or for feedback, if we offer it on work not accepted on first review. Our publishing service is non-profit-making, created with a love of sharing creative writing and social and personal growth it produces. Donations to support Wildfire Words’ sustainability are welcome, but voluntary. A donation does not affect whether we publish a submission.

We aim to include writers worldwide. We respect all people and their well-being, beliefs, individuality, and free speech, and expect the same from writers. We’ll publish any work that adds fresh creative spice to this feature. We’ll evaluate your jewel, whether it’s a cut and polished dazzler or a rough stone with interesting lustre.