Two Poems by Glyn F Edwards
L’Accalmie (Baie Saint-Paul)
The bleached hull, sunk now into a white-washed shore,
moored at marram grass bollards
drifts on tides of sleep, currents of age.
Restharrow and sandwort knot it to the drydock,
only through cataract wheelhouse windows,
does a visiting sea silver near.
At dusk, while distant Montreal becomes campfire coals,
this beached boat trembles again its sinewy rigging,
checks thinned charts and maps a motionless voyage.
Soon, Cassiopiea dusts a rusty mast in diamond,
the Little Fox stalks nebula towards neglected nets,
and Cygnus hurries a shoal of stars onto the deck.
The sky, a saturate of swimming light,
The boat lulled into life by night.
Fox
There was fire in him somewhere
that she had never seen lit before.
He would see them now in streetlight flickerings
and in the warmness of half-closed bins. He
would hear them crow behind fastened, tired houses.
He was committed to the thought of the fox.
In the summer she’d have to keep bacon fat
to one side and freeze fishheads. Order books,
frame pictures. For him, leave warmed milk, bread.
Perhaps.
She hoped she wouldn’t have to tell him
it might not have been a fox
that flared out from behind the shed yesterday
and erupted into the photonia.
She watched him from the window watching spaces
leaned in closer to his mittened paws and hungry gaze.
He shivered, wrenched his hat down,
slumped again upon his elbows. Tried to stifle his yawn.
Her breath made a faint figure on the glass. It was
past bedtime when she carried him indoors.
Glyn F Edwards is a winner of the National Teaching Awards, the Terry Hetherington Young Writers Award and the Wales Poetry competition. His poems have been published by Cheval, Prole and the National Trust and he will be the resident poet and blogger at Chester Literature Festival in October. He is not the actor who played the barman in Only Fools and Horses.
‘L’Acalmie’ is featured alongside two other new poems by Glyn F Edwards, in the new, Winter Issue of The Lonely Crowd. You can order a copy here.
Copyright @ Glyn F Edwards, 2015. Image © Jerome Theriault, 2015.