Forlorn Hope

When we can no longer
communicate in words
we’ll turn to them.
 
See how they line up
and march off
crying, waving, smiling
 
into the breach, armed only
with dots and dashes –
our last, best intentions.
 
🙂
 

Eleanor Livingstone

published in One Magazine, 10, 2010

 
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Some Fine Day

In an overgrown field halfway between
here and there, off a winding road which leads
up to the one point from where on fine days
both the Forth and Clyde rivers can be seen
there’s a memorial to the Scots killed
in Korea; but today is not fine
and warm thick rain which has filled the gutters
careers along the road ahead of us
splashes off our wheels, pulls the heavens down
to circle our shoulders like a damp towel
and as we slow, mindful of the danger
that may be coming from behind, and peer
through the gate at a drenched intensity
of green, in truth, we see nothing at all.
 

Eleanor Livingstone

published in When Pigs Chew Stones, 2007, Ragged Raven Poetry

 
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After Belasitsa

     “Shall they return to beatings of great bells?”
          Wilfred Owen
 
In 1014 Emperor Basil ordered
the defeated army to be blinded
 
fourteen thousand men, more
or less, fourteen thousand
 
pairs of eyes, but for one
in every hundred soldiers
 
left with a single eye to weep
and lead his comrades home.
 

Eleanor Livingstone

published in A Little Touch of Cliff in the Evening, 2012, New Writing Scotland

 
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Another Life

     “like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit”
          The Venerable Bede
 
Left alone up there in the dark
the starling would have gone
quietly, huddled against a box
of Christmas decorations,
 
a few late flutterings causing
tiny bells to ring out of season,
the iridescence of his wings
fading to a dusty black.
 
But we threw open the hatch,
rattled the Ramsay ladder
and startled him into wild panic,
 
nothing straightforward
about his sojourn here
except that final mad flight.
 

Eleanor Livingstone

in collection Even the Sea, 2023 edition, Red Squirrel Press,
ISBN 978-1-913632-48-9

 
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