Author: Diana Sanders

This planet is not terra firma

What was most significant about the lunar voyage was not that man set foot on the Moon but that they set eye on the Earth.   On the first day in space they pointed to countries. On the third day they pointed to continents and by the fifth day they were aware of only one […]

All Souls

i Starlings rumble the morning; dark clouds constantly moving. Wren mute with their bantering. They are potent. I breathe and think of friends who walk softly beside me even though          they are dead. ii Your light kindles my light and my light kindles another and suddenly the darkness is ablaze with lamps of gold.

It always starts with a trickle;

a drip from the gutter, a splash from a road puddle. droplets cluster and procreate; a lake ripples over grass. Waves froth and rise up; crunch pebbles and bones. Water floods in from above. A dream re-stitched and recycled. Torpedo slashed the old packet. Empty eyes passed him in the water. Ocean filled the radio […]

atavus

i swim under curtains of bronze seed shaken out by birch fingers gloved with air beads immersed in chiaroscuro of sun and dark water in the bottomless lake my bones lengthen into baleen shapes there are shapes in the water atavistic voices wriggle into my skin i sink pulled by katabatic currents into nascence

Rift

My Grandmother was anti-Semitic. It split my family in two. My Dad not good enough despite the torpedoes that sped his way on merchant ships. One time he went back to get his gloves but water parted them and all there was, was death and fire and oil. In the local pub a farmer sits […]

sinai ii

midnight frost is in our ears not sleeping under jupiters watch bedouin faces are stars lit by fire we walk in charcoal following moses I smell the singed dawn and am consumed

Meeting

I scatter marigold petals to guide you home. There is humming in the air – a fragment of a song you used to sing – rising and falling with wings of bumblebees. Pipe smoke twists out of a bonfire. I remember, you reading Le Morte d’Arthur in a cubist patterned armchair. I could bring to […]

sinai

there is a temple in the desert pillars prone and hieroglyphics scattered thoughts i am blind to meaning but listen all I hear are my own footsteps too loud i stand still as the peregrine a coptic prayer is on the wind old as grains of sand there is a monk hidden in rock mind […]

Ring of Brodgar

I knew you’d be late. You’re always late. The shrinks say it’s a power thing. I watched a fly emerge from morning lethargy into a frenetic map reading of the window. In beads of condensation it traced an outline of the Orkneys detailing the ring of Brodgar. Admittedly it missed out one or two of […]