Castaway

 

I knew your incarnations

in office and university

but imagined you on a hillside, writing.

 

Drawn to the simplest lines:

rock, sky, grass, pen, paper

and a way forward,

you write within the elements.

 

Edinburgh, an unstable mould,

falls away too easily.

 

You slip clear,

leaving a worn-out skin

among the blackened spires.

 

Under the station’s yellowed lights

I envied your velvet coat,

bookshop job, creative writing course

and flat with four cats.

 

I’d forgotten you had desires left unspoken.

 

You fragment this gray city,

shedding your surroundings

until you glow

 

an acetate butterfly

freed from its wire.

---

Gerry Stewart is a poet and creative writing tutor /editor based in Finland. Her poetry collection, Post-Holiday Blues was published by Flambard Press, Uk. Her writing can be found at http://thistlewren.blogspot.fi/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Green

 

My solace lies

in the flame and roast

of the dying year,

but my hope for this life

is the silk new leaves,

shoots pushing

through warmed soil.

 

My contemplation curls

in woollen blankets and mulled wine,

but my reverie runs

in fields of swishing grass

to the whirr of insects.

 

My labours for my family

mulch leaves to feed

gold mushrooms,

but my respite breathes

in the lush tree branches

above the river’s slow bend.

 

My own fears reside

in the rust-dark dwindling year,

but I bury them deep

with poems in the moss

beneath the stone walls.