Silver Branch series:
Becky Lowe
Rebecca Lowe is a journalist, poet and organiser of Spoken Word events, based in Swansea, South Wales.
Her first poetry collection Blood and Water is published by The Seventh Quarry
A further collection Our Father Eclipse was published with Culture Matters in April 2021.
Winter Solstice
Someone pressed pause on the Sun,
as if to reset a world worn weary of waiting;
Our eyes thirst for colour to temper the monochrome,
its dulling ache of cold; the trees grown old,
A lone gull pecks for scraps at last night’s peelings
And in this space, we embrace the despond,
the roots that twist beneath our feet
where quiet thoughts can germinate,
awaiting rebirth.
M4, Southbound
Tree shadows strobing the road
dance electric to traffic trance,
interlacing lanes with leaves
A silver line of cars threads and weaves,
the windscreens slick with rain –
Small, grey
swallows
in search
of a summer.
(First appeared in Blood and Water,
publ. The Seventh Quarry 2020)
Dyfatty Flats
A bowling green mapped incongruously upon the scrub,
Weeds subdued to stubble; cigarette ends, glass bottles,
A broken mannequin lies abandoned behind boarded-up shops
Above which the sky hangs long and heavy,
Weltering rain through purple bruises,
The sun closes her eyes through streaks of silver,
Dreams…
The sound of a river
Crying itself to sleep.
(Black Bough, issue 3/ Blood and Water)
Autumn Birds
The pristine skies
are printed with birds
on the move,
They crotchet
the telephone lines,
playing jazz
down the wires
And we stop
to listen, turning
our ears
to the music of rain,
White noise
on grey screens
tumbling
homeward
over the edge
of clouds.
The Wind Sings Winter
The silvered branch is brittle-edged with frost,
The wind sings winter through the trees,
Cats cling to the shelter of doorsteps, wind-tossed,
The silvered branch is brittle-edged with frost,
The cold, grey morning window is embossed
with ice crystals; we sit and count the lost
long days of summer’s memories.
The silvered branch is brittle-edged with frost,
The wind sings winter through the trees.
Mistletoe
Suspended between the heavens and the earth,
Your fertile bough, which plants the kiss of love
upon the sky – the promise of new birth
Suspended between the heavens and the earth,
Tears of Frigga, treasure beyond worth,
The longest night, yet here begins the birth
of better days, of hope – you shine above
Suspended between the heavens and the earth,
Your fertile bough, which plants the kiss of love.
(Black Bough, Christmas Edition 2021)
Whispering Reeds
A swan with frozen feathers
plaits the willow with her beak
in hope of spring.
The tender unveiling
of a fern, unfurling her soft,
bejewelled garden of green…
Playful fingers of white, wild wind
pluck fluff from pointed bulrush
and send it shivering into the sky
The curlew’s cry,
The wind-tipped heron
whirls and dips to plunge,
Flurry of frost and feather
And the deeper, unfathomable things.
Hawk slices the sky
to catch, clean and deep
on silent talons,
Only her shadow
betrays her
Spinning cloak of sun,
Throb of rain
and battleship sky
Teach me the secret art
of silence.
Autumn
Ivy strangles the
music from each folded vein,
The pulse of each contending thing,
The rhythms of rain,
Their striving shadows.
Out of Season
The tide breathes out driftwood on the foam. Out of season. Out of time. Bark stripped to bare bone.
Knuckles nobbled, stretched skins preserved by salt of stinging years, ebbed to a liminal state of neither life nor death, but something in between. We wash up in shoals at cafes and bookshops, curled at the edges, spines bent with dust, to whisper over cappuccinos, heads a foaming tide of nodding white. Out of season. Out of place.
A pair of hungry seagulls
Peck and fight
Over a piece of bone
Scraped clean
As a china plate
The sea bleaches everything, sucks out all colour. The sky, a bluish grey, has turned the streets sepia. We wear beige, abhor exotic flavours, and cannot bear excess of emotion. Our manners are impeccable. We bear ourselves upright as polished pebbles.
A clinging clammy damp that winds itself into the soul, imprints clothes, skin, hair – a stinging, dingy damp, that sticks to everything it touches, moulded and mildewed, that cleaves to rock and bone and skin, strips the flowered paper from the walls, crawls in uninvited through the cracks. The damp slips ghostly, tugs curtains, ruffles petticoats, tweaks the frills of napkins, and renders matches, lighters and all forms of ignition impotent.
And now the clocks fall –
Time going backward,
The lengthening of shadows,
The perpetual stride of time.
Birds gather in murmuration,
Iron filings against the clouds,
Trace magnetic north
Through steel-grey skies.
From ‘The Eastside Cycle’:
Martyrs
In these dark days, Saints
are everywhere
singing from the pages
of well-worn books,
wings crumpled
to the touch of fingers
Today, reflected
on the subway wall,
a fractured halo
of sunlight, half-caught,
flutters in the tension
of traffic’s dulled
bluebottle buzz.
Ecstatic rainbows
dance the petrol
pooled beneath
our feet, as you await
my answer:
‘I am conflicted,’ I protest –
Chain myself to the stake
of my own destruction
Light the touch paper,
See me burn.
