Silver Branch Series
Roger Hare
"Writing, for me, starts usually in my love of being diverted by something overheard, an observation, a fascination, insight or emotion. From this genesis, I enjoy letting the poem make its own way, sometimes to surprising conclusion. Through review and editing I try to distil the images, shaping them as much as I can into a piece that harmonises with me and gives any reader the chance to share in the spark that set it burning."
Herefordshire-based writer Roger Hare has work in Elbow Room, Liminal Residency, Dream Catcher, Anthropocene, Re-Side, Lyrical Eye, Spillwords, Ice Floe Press, BeZine, Sarasvati (forthcoming) and Fevers of the Mind and is published in five anthologies – ‘Deep Time 2’, ‘Dark Confessions’ and ‘Freedom Rapture’ (Black Bough Poetry), ‘Black Lives Matter’ (Civic Leicester) and ‘Art’ (Dreich chapbook).
Roger was commended in the 2019 ‘Gloucestershire Writers Network Competition’, a prizewinner in the 2020 Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition and the 2021 Rare Swan Press Ekphrastic Competition, commended in the 2021 Allingham Festival Poetry Prize, longlisted in the 2021 Yaffle Poetry Prize and Pushcart nominated in 2021. He had a pamphlet commended in the 2021 Frosted Fire Firsts Competition.
He can be found on Twitter @RogerHare6.
Exposure
Let the slow surf of rock
bear your dust,
Earth won’t know you;
only our waste
remains still,
long enough
to register
in its long exposure
From Deep Time 2
Compass
Demons sew their dreams
into our torques and ellipses –
we hold course by glorious iron
disguised in our bedrock
in Freedom Rapture
Glossolalia
Water combs its river grass –
each rising plume
a gentle speaking in tongues
kept from the ears of all but the lonely.
in Freedom Rapture
On Eagle’s Wings
A preacher once told me that only certain birds can fly
in rain, but I see all our hues and cries rise
to the lowering sky – everyone needs someone
who they can move to tears
in Freedom Rapture
Finding My Way (Cornwall)
A shaft of saints,
a spoil of tin Gods –
inspiring cartography
in Dark Confessions
Kintsugi
The many pieces
I have broken us into –
it’ll take all the gold
in Dark Confessions
Fatal Attraction
Your beauty builds up
in my blood, bone and hair –
the dark side of lead
in Dark Confessions
Listen to 3 poems by Roger Hare on Soundcloud
Marsden Moor
At the head of a Clough
I bleed my truth
into an emerging brook:
walkers on the old packhorse bridge below
will speak of ghosts.
“… the shingle precludes a garden”
Derek Jarman (diary 18/8/1987)
I consider my spit-swept land
where Easterlies
refuse
to die
spend my hands sculpting
memories of
a fractured time-
line;
seed
of how I want
my legacy
to be
seen
I weep
I weep
The sea
Gratitude
Birch leans its silver
to the care of a nearby Fir.
New growth strikes
straight to the sky, ignites
the blue with white, strokes
the clouds with brotherly love.
The ingenuity of simple mechanics
can sometimes be
all that’s needed
to delay our downfall.
Strata
Our operatics find a place with leaves;
arias received alongside treasures
of pleasured petals and the rain
of an autumn harvest;
all the residue of our expectancy
shuttered in the eyes of a Deity or two
who find the heavens
as confusing a place as we do.
So many of our scores, once stitched
through air’s strata, are settled without making a mark –
like jellyfish, dying, that leave no trace
in diatomaceous earth.
When It Comes To Birds
some migrate however
a few have learned to remove snow
so
when severity wants a place in you
stay fast and light pray with open eyes
In 1978
I slipped your name between
the folios of my breath, believing
its pigment would stain each-
and-every recto/verso.
I find it now, petals pressed
so precisely, so dead –
all my pages
pristine.
Shooting Stars
When I was young I blu-tac’d a map
on the wall of every room that was mine;
a map of the world decorated (as
I thought it at the time)
with longitude, latitude
and those mysterious tropics.
It was only the other day
that I wondered if such focus
had habituated my eyes to the Earth,
stopped me from looking up,
from the sight
of whatever was writing the sky.
Gone Fishing
Written outside the home of W S Graham in Madron, Cornwall
Your baited words catch me,
battle-scarred but still thrashing
on the slab
Feed me something
to sustain the sheer effort
of being alive.
Limestone Landscape in Moonlight
A frozen sea as far as the eye.
Trillion-upon-trillion traces
of coral souls beneath our feet.
Light that began while all this lay deep
caresses the carboniferous memory
bound, once more, for water.
