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Poetry

Two poems

Olivia Walwyn

Two poems from Olivia Walwyn’s debut collection Halcyon, the winner of the 2019 Straid Collection Award

 

Detour

Taking the ridge I encountered the wind

full-frontal, coming up over the plain

and the light buffeting, gentle on every

weathered gritstone boulder and clump

of winter heather. The path set with neat

cut stones. I balanced along, enlivened

just to feel the tilt of my weight in the wind’s

soft catch, torso, while the wind-swept

trees froze, their profiles an expression

of close-eyed pleasure. Just a small detour

but it meant that I had dipped back into

that stratum where I was more myself,

could see the perspective, like a boat

righting and gaining the crest – here I was

alive in a beautiful world, while the wind

flapped at my ear like a shook-out cloth.

 

Skyline Runners

Thrown almost off-pace: numbers

flappering in the gale – tugged

bulging from vests. Silence

settles on the head-down, tip-toeing along

 

field – like saplings, the tight-twined

grip of branches; tillers

holding to course – up to Winder

steadying themselves on the thrust –

 

the line of their own stems – kites

snagged on the firm prod

of step by step; pulled taut

back down, an incremental height

 

gain, unknowable from a distance.

They have shrunk into the hold

of themselves, behind the palaver

of flailing hoods, loose toggles, the slap

 

of each buffet – bright floods

break through as they gut-

gauge the view, that opens –

the sweep of field and hedge from under

 

the heathery clouds, before

they’re shoved back down, taunted

by spatters, undaunted –

at one with the squall and the bluster.

 

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