Poems with spaces where places should be…. Post your poems below. In May selected poems from these prompts will be published on The Poetry Shed… happy writing…
Writing prompt 7: spaces
Poems with spaces where places should be…. Post your poems below. In May selected poems from these prompts will be published on The Poetry Shed… happy writing…
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Abegail Morley 
The Cruellest Month
April came wearing a mask
squeezing the breath out of parks and gardens
crushing the smile out of my father at war
black and white on my mantelpiece
concentrating on short breaths
watering lettuce in his allotment, dusty
and parched as old sackcloth, his legs astride
balancing years of overweight, high blood pressure
and the loneliness of his one room days.
I surprise myself sometimes in windows,
I almost look like him now – like winter forgot to end,
to throw off its vast grey-laid land. ‘We are supposed
to be in the month of blossom, cuckoos and swallows
returning to eaves like angels of spring.’ Jack shouted
from two fences away, mug of tea in hand.
And yes, I agreed, from behind our barricades
we have time to notice how pink spring sycamore leaves are,
to recognise the scent of white lilac scattering lanes
and washing lines. We have time to stand and stare
at cherry trees weeping, elephants and bears chasing the sky,
the space to remember how we breathed clean air
deep and beautiful.
Kerry Darbishire
NOTHING
The swelling pause,
The nothing between girls’ legs,
The gaps at the backs of knees,
The open
Mouth,
Between the toes,
The silence between thoughts,
And all that massive space that separates
Stars, and the parts of atoms,
Women and their men,
The erased peoples of this planet,
The plains where once grew grasses wild
And buffalo. And freedom.
That swart blue place in my old red heart,
Where you shone brief a merciful torch
That held, and saved, for a beautiful while.
Lots of holes of nothingness, all types, I can name, precise,
Except for this black one, intense with desire;
Quickened and focused, with avid intent
– Determined to not be stillborn.
Beautiful Olive. You’ve reached a long way with this poem, and I love how it circles back at the end. 🙂
Thank you Kerry …and thank you for pointing out something I had not consciously realised!
[I love it when readers see more than me..!]
That’s the magic of poetry – to write from the heart ! Sorry I misspelled your name!!
Bucharest
we were strangers
in a strange city
by which I mean
it was a place
of enchantment
shadowed by vampires
we imagined beyond its
more than 20,000 churches
its boulevards and trees
we would walk
on the battlements
of an ancient castle
but only clouds
glittering like shape-changers
floated in the cold lake
Caroline Carver Mylor 8/5/20
Virus
Social distanced from family and friends
I watch the world, a glassed in view
As silence wraps around me, I remember
We by a sat lake without a moon,
Enveloped in deep darkness, an eerie sound
Planning our future, blanking out the world
waiting for the dawn,a faint glow of sun rising
music of the morning, the language of nature.
Now I wait, wanting the warmth of your touch,
I find no peace in this enforced solitude.
Broch
In the broch’s hollow,
stone beds, tanks,
stairs to the roof,
tilt and tumble,
make space
between sleep
and dreaming,
one step
to another,
to the hills’ wavy line
Fitty, Gallo
and Knucker,
their sway-backed rise
into breast, into belly
seeded and curved
with the dead
on their backs
hands to their sides
pointing east
back to the stone skeleton
where they lived
where the spaces
they left curl
round the gaps.
Lydia Harris