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Two poems by Steven Milne

“Road Accident” and “Horses”

Stephen Milne
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

  • For Ellie
  • 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.

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Stephen Milne
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

  • For Ellie
  • 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.

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