Poetry

pixabay photo

By

Christopher Hopkins

Chemistry in old photographs

There is a truth to old photos

a certain light of green halos.

How the chemistry fading in colours

is our compass

to how far away  there  has become.

Mom,    Dad,    Home.

We ache of love in our pasts.

These things

dig into us,    break our surface

like roots pushing up the tarmac on the driveway.

I found in these squares of shelter

that the only shadows are from the sun

and we look now

knowing where the blood goes, how the years end

how I found beauty in the things I gave away.

We all wore the same plaid shirts,

our young skin held in arms

of old loved ghosts in red backed chairs

which would smoke a room in seconds

like fires could.

Our un-coded moments.

The photo was the physical, it

was the effort, commitment, money.

Our attempt of permanence now for such fleeting things

butterfly nets above our flux.

Here we’ve stop growing old.

My veins are flat against the paper

the hard and the sunlight flash.

We humans

need the physical, the chemistry.

The last time we saw strangers

The forecast

ran off the cold-starred hills

in ice cold streams.

The Atlantic had brought her snows

as dead as dead can be.

We watch the moorhens land

duck their coot heads

in flashes of red

in the flow of umber spill, thick

with the chill.

Walking the towpath

dressed as December

feeling with our feet

the puddle ice

bend and give.

You kiss the sun through the strobing trees

but I am thankful for its kisses.

The graffiti on the underpass

is in a dreaming of spring

above our pale reed colours.

We move with hitched hands, tight

and bare against the cold.

We talk of the wood-burning

and sing of the bitter peat sting.

We’ll let the stale air out, and let the goodness in.

Off the idle haul road, we see

the town’s bull colours through the ribs

of her black iron bridge.

The last time our eyes caught with strangers

they spilt keen, as quick as the moorhen’s fleck.

Tin line

I watch the buffalos from the train.

Catch the nervous shiver twitch

in their shoulders as they line.

The thick breath and the cold

calls up all their cherub robes

up from the herd of gas cans

up to the lack of imagination of a sky

to the clouds grieving over the junction.

I see the air-dancers in the car lots

moving like lsrael in the shallows.

Line upon line of the fly belly colours

where the tents go back to back.

There I feel the bend and judder sway

fighting the capsize, the muffled steel rhyme

the hypnosis in symphony of pressure hits

and doppler shifts which sign the landscape passing.

The sound wave of the city building by the mile.

I lean into my untameable portrait.

A tin-plated stare of my exile eyes

talking lockjaw to my next to kin.

Now come our timed departing

the straphanger rush

our magnolia blush and heave

wide awake with the birds in the station rafters

we’ll scatter, like wheel spit seeds into the city.

And as our unspeaking family

we’ll all ride the dry pod home.

Christopher Hopkins

I was born and raised in Neath, South Wales. I currently reside in the Canterbury area of Kent with my wife and daughter. My debut poetry chapbook ‘Take Your Journeys Home’ was published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House in November 2017 and has received a nomination for the IPPY book award for poetry and two of its poems, ‘Sorrow on the Hill’ and ‘Smoke and Whiskey’ have also received nominations for the Pushcart Prize.

I have had poems published in The Morning Star (UK), Riggwelter Press, Backlash Press, The Paragon Journal, The Blue Nib Magazine, Ibis Head Review, The Journal (formally the Contemporary Anglo – Scandinavian poetry), Rust & Moth, Harbinger Asylum, Scarlet Leaf Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, VerseWrights, Tuck Magazine, Dissident Voice magazine, Poetry Superhighway, Duane’s PoeTree, Outlaw Poetry. My spoken word poetry has also featured in a podcast of Golden Walkmen Magazine podcast, which also is to be included for their ‘Best of the Year’. I have also has had work feature in the MIND Anthology called ‘Please Hear What I’m Not Saying‘ (February 2018). I also have a YouTube channel dedicated to my poetry readings.