Let us sip ice-cold lemonade through a straw and talk of furry caterpillars, thrushes’ eggs, the swoosh of a paddle-steamer. Let us watch a plane go past, its vapour trail a line chalked on blue sugar paper. Let us lie in the grass without speaking, then I’ll read you a poem about blizzards, wool slippers, […]
PNAutumn13
The Bridge in the Rain
after Hiroshige Curse this rain! It pierces me like needles on my back. Why did the mistress summon me on a morning like this, making me cross the bridge over the river? I have to hop like a frog ridiculously from side to side to avoid the puddles. Not that it’s much fun sitting […]
Black Water
A little after dawn, the estuary still as a tin dish of milk and the air astringent, like a pain so true it must just be borne. On the mudbank, Brent geese talk gentleness to one another their soft round voices like small observed thoughts afloat over the gunmetal of the flats, the sheepwool […]
Blue Lake
The adults said only mountaineers could access the quarry – but we found what lies past the disused church and the phone box with its peeling paint. A broken stile, empty fields edged with hawthorns, and a padlocked five-bar gate. We squelched across marshland, took the right-hand fork at the bridge, gripped the earth as […]
Queen Conch Ode
You with your meat as heavy as half the haunch of a woman. Soft mollusc. Benthic Bahamian beauty. Your glossy pink ear, spiny convolvulus flares; yielding pearl – chatoyant, like moiré silk in the coral seas you listen to. You with your stomach-foot treading on algae; debris. Your long egg masses. Long-liver, you love the […]
Crocodile
All afternoon, your body plays it cool in the deep end, sends your head up for a peek, a periscope with teeth. A rock-shaped head among head-shaped rocks, your variegated tints are dangerous as a man in camouflage paint. You stepped from prehistory into this century on plaything legs. Your females lay around […]
William Bradford, Elder
(From Landing, Plymouth Rock) They say her eyes were defiant, as though she willed it; saw ten rosy crabs on the ocean floor and, yes, wanted to be there, weaving little boxes out of seaweed, naked and hairless, a girl-shaped gap in the water. She cannot tell me a thing, her teeth rigid, her lips […]
Jonathan Edwards
Jonathan Edwards was born and grew up in south Wales. He has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick and currently works as an English teacher. He won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, was awarded a Literature Wales new writer’s bursary in 2011, and in 2012 won prizes in the Cardiff International […]