Poetry

AFP photo

By

Christopher Hopkins

The Tracing Paper Sky

The sun’s accomplice shines

In the tracing paper sky.

Moonbeams do your worst,

With your pale knives in the room.

A glance of my reflection,

In the naked mirrored view.

A tarmac complexion shadowed,

By the crescent’s silver tongues.

I have not the will to tell my tale,

My shape does speak its own.

The years have ploughed and furrowed skin,

Through the phases moon and sun.

An even weight around my neck,

The guilt that never shakes.

Let the silver light sink in, in deep

And open up the veins.

From the world outside my window,

Or vex behind my brow,

What else or next, that can be asked,

Of this composite vessel.

I look at my outlined reflection,

In the naked silver view.

Lit from the single point of call

In the tracing paper sky.

Devils Land

Virgin dusts,

dance and twist on rust freckled sheets,

on the abandoned corrugated portraits,

of lives moved on.

The whistling winds are dead birds prayers,

and on the distant chalked flights,

mountains rise like

sound waves.

Sand in my boots and mouth,

and the sun

gets closer and closer.

The temperature builds,

in the space between grains.

Dog shake heat

comes off the ground in wonder,

and the virgin dusts

long for the blessing touch.

Forty days straight,

of a teething sun.

Forty days straight,

without a sign from God upon this land.

Christopher Hopkins

I was born and raised in Neath, South Wales, surrounded by machines and trees, until my early twenties before moving to Oxford. I currently reside in Canterbury at the ripe old age of 41.

I enjoy read Heaney, Kevin Powers, Thomas (D & E) and Fred Voss amongst others.

Poetry has been my ladder out of some dark places.