On Not Knowing

by Lesley Saunders

The nature of regret is delicate, a door
that should have been there, but is not;

what happened back up in the hills
was a matter of luck, nothing personal –

the fact of the forests, the leaf-moths,
the fork in the road. (There are no images,

save for the river running to sand, salt
on the tongue, the pulse of previous stars.)

A winner of the Members' Poems competition in the Spring 2017 issue of Poetry News. The competition, on the theme of 'Dilemma', was judged by R.A. Villanueva.

Lesley Saunders has published many collections, most recently Nominy-Dominy (Two Rivers Press); A Part of the Main, a joint publication with Philip Gross and Valerie Price, is forthcoming this autumn from Mulfran Press. Previous collections include: The Dark Larder (Corridor Press, 1997); Christina the Astonishing, with Jane Draycott and Peter Hay (Two Rivers Press, 1998); Her Leafy Eye (Two Rivers Press, 2009), a collaboration with artist Geoff Carr; No Doves (Mulfran Press, 2010); and Cloud Camera (Two Rivers Press, 2012). The Walls Have Angels was published by Mulfran Press in 2014. Her poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, Arete, PN Review, Poetry London, Scintilla, Mslexia, Rialto, The North, Spare Rib, The Warwick Review and The Poetry Business anthology. She was a winner in the Poetry News members’ poems competitions in 2011 and 2014. Her poem ‘The Uses of Greek’ was shortlisted for the Best Single Poem in the Forward Prize 1999; and in 2008 she was joint first in the inaugural Manchester competition for a portfolio of poems. She won the Frogmore Poetry Prize 2014. She is currently working on a book of translations of the acclaimed Portuguese poet Maria Teresa Horta. She is an experienced educational researcher.