May 2020
Penny Blackburn
p.blackburn3@sky.com
Bio Note: I live in the North East of England, although I am originally from Yorkshire and it shows. I write poetry and short fiction around my full-time job as a teacher of young adults with Special Needs. I see a similarity between standing in front of a class and standing in front of an audience to perform spoken word, although one has better applause. Publishing credits include Broken Spine, Maytree Press and Poetry News.

Abandoned

 The steady swing of pendulum moments
tocks cold across the dusty parquet floor.
Careworn paint, battered on the skirting,
makes ground-level landscapes
for late afternoon traversing.
The newspapers pile, then fall. Pile again,
pasting where the damp gets in
when the weather comes from the wrong direction.
The fly against the pane
beats counterpoint to unheard clock,
till both fall silent.

Power

I took the sun from the midday sky,
dotted it into the edges of fragmentary puddles.

I took the wind from the rippling fields,
hid it under spray-soft waves.

I plucked the stones from the clay-clot earth,
raised them higher than the ancient oaks

which I folded neatly into post-stamp squares.
I wove a bridge of fog, hammered nails with rainbows,

put every natural thing out of itself
and shaped it within an inverted bubble.

Still your eyes slid from me
and fell another way.
©2020 Penny Blackburn
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