2nd Prize Winner of the OSP Poetry Competition
The sky is moonless again.
Night unfurls its voided pall, corvid-dark, unembroidered.
The black-dog catches sight and screams, insurrecting the conductor’s lulling harmonies.
Alerted, colonisers seize this emptied lot - tricky imps that shoot,
musket-mad,
rounds reverberating in circuitry clashes - the same tuning-fork
buzz of a plague of starving locusts.
Daybreak cuts a bloodied bolt - a jolt that sends down the swarm and then
the fiends retreat, if not for a while, to clear to a ravaged view,
barren but for wicked spores formed of vestigial claims,
floating discarded,
dandelions,
dispersing
like flocks-freed.
His flame-razed fields, the farmer strains to slash and burn to renew and replace the
peat-soaked trenches with fertile ground that makes life possible once more.
He covers the toiled soil with perfunctory notions that, though ideal in their uniformity,
make bleachfields of the land, choking it with an encompassing whiteness,
emboldening the line of the sole spire that
mocks from up hill-high.
Incensed, the pollen of day scatters to the skies, denying its perfumed comforts,
harbinger to the oppressive cloth that swaddles everything until stuck, limb-bound and
atrophying, with fewer defences than last-night’s nought.
But the desolate, addled with fevered ideations, squint to see a mind’s eye tricked.
Where sky-cloth was moonless once before, bursts a tear, waxing crescent,
a fragment of an opal button, promising of a guiding light that shines in intoxicating swells.
In time, all will reflect this luminance full-grown - as they dance like supernovas, too
drunk on
maenad merriment to see
how light slowly depletes once more,
and then they’ll mourn,
deserted,
longing again for its brilliance,
forgetting how the moon is tidal,
how it wanes before it
shores.