Stephen Milne
Road Accident
- A night of glassy ghosts in the meadows.
- A black night of ice and rain,
- winter’s voltage set hard to stun, the earth
- hammered into unpredictable motion.
- The road was closed, I later found, by death.
- By broken glass and metal frail as flowers
- wrapped around the branches of a cherry.
- If I had cared less, it could have been us,
- a red wreath burning like Sirius,
- star at the side of your head, halo of blood
- like petals on the undemonstrative lane.
- Instead it was our neighbor, a simple man
- whose life was unhallowed, whose wife broke down
- and crumpled like a pillow, impotent
- against grief, the exhumation of her fears
- and the ancient language of ice and fire.
Horses
- The sun hunts them like ghosts in the trees.
- Bramble and thorn cradle their lost earth,
- the palaeography of their flesh
- and its fossil bones streaming with light.
- In their dark skulls, thunder bleeds
- like fields that have broken their hooves,
- their stray foals Jurassic as ferns,
- leaf-whispers between forest and plain.
- Unwavering, they gather to a stillness,
- echo of an arcane myth,
- translators of the divine solace.
- Their touch brings the wounded, running through time.
Stephen Milne lives and works in Lincolnshire in the United Kingdom. He has been previously published in a number of small magazines and journals and is married with six children. He is planning to release his first volume of poems, entitled Moorings, later this year.