Beechbank Burn by Ross Wilson

We’d run by the burn when the burn
didn’t run at all. Stopped in summers youth,
low and still in the no flow time zone
when we had it all – warm summer light,
nights far off as the sea mouth gulping
greedy as a beer monster, our burn.

We didn’t know it crashing through bushes,
on the run across imaginary enemy-lines,
ducking behind NO DUMPING signs
people ignored to jettison their crap –
magpie-bairns salvaging scrap:
old washing machines concealed in leaves,

wheel-barrows, car seats, cupboards in trees . . .
One day we discovered old cassettes
from the fifties in bags beached by the burn –
compilations of voices recorded long before
we were born: discarded, flowing on
in the winter-gush fast-forwarding the burn –

archaic pop guddled by a new generation.
We ran against the current to an old soundtrack.


Ross Wilson, Scotland, UK

Winter Clothes by Ian Mullins

Almost summer, they say; and outside
all the evidence is in place
to confirm the diagnosis. A stale water sky,
yard dressed in confetti; and that sweet aching smell
that’ll wake me up sneezing
every day in June, driving me indoors
until the weather cools

and I can look out
on a dream so beautiful
that everyone dreams it
at exactly the same time.
Remember crossing the bridge
from school, tearing off your shirt
bombing down through the waves:
finding a hollow in the dunes
that feels more like home
than the room barricaded
with the winter things you love
when frost smokes leaves
dry as new sweaters,
and the snow posts cards
through your door.

But here you must be naked
and afraid, shot out of a dream
you only belong to
when you turn out of the office to run
someone else’s errand
and all the skies of summer are out there,
like a postcard from a land
you’ll never visit again;

and you’ll never know why
you need winter
to feel such a summer in your bones.


Ian Mullins

Nesting by Robert Demaree

On our pond at Golden Pines
We check each day the shaded grove
Where the swans are nesting.
Shouldn’t be long, we say.
The male shares the duty,
Giving them a leg up
On other species we could name;
But then he wanders off.
Any day now, we remark.
But at the water’s edge:
Some eggs are smashed,
New ones in their place.
Still the mother patiently sits,
Reminding us of things
We wish we did not know.



Robert Demaree, NH, USA

Time Travelling by Peter Branson

“Bird species are disappearing at a scarcely conceivable rate.”

(‘Muscicapa Striata: The Spotted Flycatcher’)

Each spring as you stack up they journey north,
re-lay that nest in your old garden wall.
You catch them at their ease, such elegance;
ash brown above a creamy dappled breast.
They dart and twist, snap insects on the wing,
turn deftly back to where they started from.
Eggs warm to touch, as sheer as porcelain;
flecked shades of gilded bronze, the Midas brush.
Each year they leave, conceive strange distances,
exotic latitudes you’ve never seen.
You’ve flown and your old habitat’s turned down,
six houses scheme. No summer guests these days.
That’s progress, you concede, fast in the fourth
dimension where your travellers still breed.





Peter Branson, UK

Tree Dream by David Chorlton

In the dream all that remained where the tree had stood
was a stump that marked
its former place at the incline
on which a trail curved back as it climbed
through white stones and grass
from the streambed to the deserted mine
and up into the stars. In the dream
some friends who had never seen the tree
when its roots ran deep into the earth
came to the spot on the occasion
of a loss so great they knew nobody would recover
the boughs reaching high
through all the seasons and thousands of leaves
opening and turning in the forest
as they had fallen and opened
for longer than anyone has been alive.
In the dream they knelt
and raised their eyes toward the sky.
In the dream there was such grief. There was
operatic weeping. There was
black, black mourning. In the dream
it was only one tree.


David Chorlton, Arizona, USA

Of Warbler and Quail by Rae Spencer

Drab little she in the brush
Muttering her song to lure
Someone else

But only I respond
Drawn across the dune
To listen closer

As a child I spoke to quail
I whistled out their bobwhite name
To hear them shriek it back

But this little warbler
Outside my beachfront door
Her accent slips my ear

Measures of water wisdom
Refrains of woven nest
Codas that fall silent

Because I have come too near
To understanding
What is lovely on this shore

Of daily tide
Of sandy soil and storms
Of quickening flocks

That speak their sea-swept names
In secret tangled tongues
Of salty sail and oar

And then they fly away
While I struggle, yearn to say
What I remember of briars

Of dry summer streams
And winter dreams
Of silent quail

Hungry among the thistle
Of home, my distant valley home
So many years from here


Rae Spencer

In Memoriam by Nadya Avila Chant

You are text and subtext, my sound and my caesura,
The verdant meadows of adolescent summers,
And the fallow fields of a dreamless winter.
You are sigh and gasp and bated breath and I
Your restless child and somnolent woman.
You keep a home in the curve of my earlobe,
In the scar on my wrist, in the white of my fingernails.





Nadya Avila Chant, Utah, USA

antler by Arthur Durkee

antler bone found in the grass
speaks of lost deer rituals, their religion of seasons
and blood

dance of hoof and antler, horn and fur ruff
circle of apple trees full of bees
and the tender undying evergreens

horn-handed deer staff a dance ritual for young bucks
while old men sit blanket-wrapped watching
sweat-braced flanks they used to know

we rub our bodies with suet and red clay
we dance the deer in spring and autumn
becoming those bones found in the grass

edges of the field at dusk still full of bees
where deer stop to stare, then walk on
suddenly doubled with ghosts of the ancestors


Arthur Durkee, USA

Ancestor Worship by Debby Regan

The last Imperial Chinese parts of
Ourselves reside in the attic
With jade busts

To throw garlands?
.............Show our reverential
Anger

These ancestors whose
Maddening destructiveness
Mocks what PBS would instill.

(I cried about the lost
polar bears who float
away from our fingertips
on iceberg rafts)

some Edwardian sailors keep
a naturalist's case of
extinction but when they retire,

the glass eyes reincarnate and
follow the specks of light
from the ceiling

Is the Irish elk in
heaven? I never saw such antlers

They say on
forty feathers of passenger
pigeons the Woolworth Building stands


Debby Regan, USA

My Tribe by Ray Sharp

The trouble is not
with the names of flowers

how to make fire
or find my way home
on a moonless night.

I dream
of the long walk
and the endless green river.

What happened to the frogs?

The sky
is bruised
above the blood-red sun.

I live among people
with three simple rules

do not kill birds
do not pee at the water-gathering place
and I can never remember the third.


Ray Sharp, Michigan, USA