New poetry by Sharon Phillips
In a Yorkshire Churchyard
sacred to the memory
slab of gritstone
dark with summer drizzle
green crags of moss
where springtails ping
from sporophytes
grey grains of quartz
specks of creamy feldspar
nematodes in puddled letters
each flood and ebb
thy will be done
formed in river deltas
white lichen moons
red spider mites
his wife and infant son
***
Maps of the West Weares
Isle of Portland, Dorset
Blacknor, Tar Rocks, Green Hump.
Amazing climbing. A falcon drops
five hundred feet to the shore.
It’s a laugh, said the boy, carefree
on a tightrope over grey cascades
of quarry waste. Want to watch?
Meltdown, Sacred Angel, Medusa
Falls. Climbers tag their steeps
and grooves. Hiram Otter, strongman,
salvationist, hand-jacked boulders
to lay a path, carved bible texts
in rocks and named the bay Allelujah
to glorify his god. Rain seeps through
limestone. Cliff failures scatter rubble.
Path closed. Diversion. Danger.
***
At Rievaulx Abbey
Green is on the cusp
of yellow
after weeks of heat
sky white-hazed
on the horizon,
air dense with song:
a flight of swallows
skims in arabesques
through window arches,
down the nave, up
where a roof once vaulted
and we stand to watch
the arcs that seem
to leave no air
between bird and wall
or bird and bird
to make stone soar
like voices raised
in plainsong.
***
Sharon Phillips began writing poetry having retired from a career in education. She has been published widely and she has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2017), the Indigo Firsts pamphlet competition (2018) and the WoLF Poetry Competition (2019). Sharon won the Borderlines Poetry Competition in 2017 and was among the winners of the Poetry Society Members’ Competition in November 2018. She is in the midst of moving from the Isle of Portland, on England’s south coast, to Yorkshire.
The painting at the head of these poems is a detail from Time on Portland by Jan Walker. Jan is from the Fenland of East Anglia where she learnt her craft, but moved to Dorset over twenty years ago.