Mpira

The emptiness of the house
snatches at my throat
deadening thought,
paralysing movement.

For an instant I had forgotten
That you are no longer here to greet me.
Silence pounces,
clawing my heart, reopening the wounds.

How can I bear it?

Strangers...

Strangers

In the night I wake
wondering what happened
to our familiarity,

your face strange on the
pillow’s creamy whiteness
dreaming far away from me.

Friendship deep in love,
once closer than my heart
joy beyond all my description

fled out the window
with a stranger’s stare and
so love suffered destruction.


How strange we are

How strange we are
meeting at the breakfast table
bathed in routine.

Hearts and thoughts
hidden behind the newspaper
reading nothing of each other.

Mundane queries
stifle creativity of feeling
as our minds rush ahead into the day.

We go to work; we talk; relate
better to the strangers we work with
than to each other, the strangers we have become.
 
Blessings

I bless the day I met you
stranger on a train
travelling forward to adventure
of a different kind.

I bless the day our eyes met,
our mouths spoke of truths
and unknown exploration
of all things new.

I bless the day our hearts met
experiencing
in joyous acknowledgment
true recognition.

I bless the day I met you
stranger on the train
of happy circumstances.
Together. Always. Ever.

March 'Writelink' competition

Lighten the dark - a story for Writelink

“Bother this. The battery has run out. I only charged it up yesterday.” Nick jiggles the phone, as if to shake sense into it. The tiny glass screen stays obdurately dark.
“Never mind.” Lena pulls hers out. “I’ll call the office. It was the grid references we wanted to check, wasn’t it?” She gazes across fields, waterlogged from the recent rain, glinting wetly in the dull light. Heavy clouds chase across the sky, bringing a chilly wind with them. The air smells damp. “Oh – I haven’t got a signal. It’s gone all dim as well.” She frowned. That morning, her laptop screen had been dark, words and pictures only just visible. She had fiddled around with the contrast, but couldn’t lighten the darkness of the screen.
“We can’t start the survey without the refs, now that these fields here are flooded. We’ll have to start on higher ground and I don’t have the exact coordinates with me. We’ll climb up a bit – the shadow of the tor might be blocking your mobile.”
Turning, Lena glances up at the hill looming above them. “I don’t see why I can’t get a signal. They’ve just put in new masts - we’re supposed to get good reception all across the county now.”
“ Well, it’s not working, is it?” Nick is growing impatient. “Anyway, we’ll get a good view from there and can decide exactly where to start.”
Nick is right. The view is magnificent. The country rolls away to the east, disappearing into the low cloud mass. Below them, the ground lies as flat as a sheet of glass, resembling nothing as much as an old waterstained mirror. The drainage ditches have all but disappeared under the floods, only the hawthorn hedges spiking scratches across the surface.
Lena’s mobile gives a signal, although the screen is still quite dark. She taps into the internet, accessing the data they need from the environmental research station.
“OK, that’s that then. Where shall we start? Nick?” Lena looks up. Nick has disappeared, but she hears voices coming from behind the rocks. As she steps nearer, she hears an old man’s voice.
“You’m better do somethin’ ‘bout it.” The words are threatening, but the voice is kindly. “Them sheep bain’t be stayin’ here, then what’ll us farmers be doin’? Countryfolk’ll die out.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asks. He looks up, frowning, as Lena joins him.
“I is tellin’ youse, sheep already be dyin’. The grass is poisoned anyways, youse can see that.”
“We haven’t heard reports of sheep dying,” says Lena, “but we HAVE come to carry out soil surveys to find out what is happening to the grass.”
“’Tis poisoned, I tell youse,” repeats the old man stubbornly. “As true as my name be Dagonet. Look you there.” He gestures at the hillside below. They stare at the round circles of flattened grass, no longer a healthy green but dark and dank.
When they turn back to Dagonet, the old man has disappeared as if he had never been there.

***
Back at the office, Lena boots her computer up. The screen is still dark, but she can access the maps with no problem.
“Look at this,” she says, “the circles form regular patterns around the masts. What should we do?”
“I don’t know,” says Nick. “I’ve already contacted the phone companies but they say they’re not responsible for the masts in this area. That old man, Dagonet, is on at me every single day about it.”
As he is speaking there is a crash as Dag throws the door open: “Come quickly, while there still be time.” He grabs Nick’s arm, urging him outside.
“He’s right, Lena. Come on.”
The sky blackens as the car weaves its way between the Levels, the drains gleaming wetly on either side.
The car corners a high hedge and comes to a juddering halt. In front of them is a giant as slender as a bundle of willow withies, astride the landscape, its metal legs blocking their path. The soil around it is completely bare, light glinting off its darkened surface as off a mirror.
A low rumble in the distance is all that is left of the brief flash of lightning which momentarily illuminates the dark sky, showing the storm edging nearer.
They tumble out of the car. “Give us yer mobile,” Dag says to Nick. He holds the phone high in the air with one hand, his shepherd’s crook in the other. He faces the giant, brandishing the crook as if it were a sword.
The wind roars around, tearing at their clothes with sadistic claws. The sky cracks open with a vicious light and slow, heavy rain falls, then gathers speed, hammering at them until their hair is plastered to their heads. The roar of thunder increases, the lightning flashes brighter until Nick can bear it no longer. He squeezes his eyes shut just as he sees Dag, who has been holding the phone all this time, bend his arm and hurl the mobile to the ground at the giant’s feet.
The metal legs of the mast begin to shake. They crumble slowly, melting to the ground, bringing the giant to its knees.
It looms over them, the ground shaking beneath it, then collapses at their feet in a mangled twist. Sightless metallic discs rock on the ground, their dead glare reflecting the lightning which still bounces from one blackened horizon to the other.
Nick and Lena are wide-eyed, their frightened eyes slipping first one way, then the other.
“There we go, we do be ended with all this,” says Dag. He picks up Nick’s phone. “See?” The screen is no longer faint. Lena’s phone, too, is fine.
“Look,” whispers Lena. She points at the bare circle. It no longer resembles a blackened mirror. Grass is growing in it, shooting up rapidly. The darkened earth is lightened with a sheen of green, then becomes indistinguishable from the turf around it.

997 words