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SENTINEL POETRY #26 Online Magazine Monthly, January 2005 |
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HEATHER
FLOOD Into Autumn Schools go back and summer
reappears (We didn’t really have
one, you see). Soon caretakers clatter
crossly around the place Still in t-shirts with
spanners saying How you can’t please
everyone. And the heating is on one
day, Not the next. Now the tiniest wing-like
leafy emanations Are collecting everywhere,
none bigger than A dry skin flake. They are in the soap and on
the bath sponge, Anywhere within a
window’s reach. Larger leaves begin
kerb-crawling A colour pageant scarcely
noticed by adults Until, perhaps, one day, A tennis ball-coloured
cast-off From a beech tree leaning
chummily close to the road, Catches the eye, luminous, And causes the involuntarily
movement of a hand, Reaching, returned to
childhood. Heather Flood is from
Glasgow. She had a poem published in the 1980 New Poetry, the PEN anthology,
edited that year by Ted Hughes. She had poems published in the eighties in a
number of Scottish publications, Renfrew Line being one. In recent years she
has focused on prose. She teaches English in a Kent school. |