Three poems

Photo by Alex Harwood on Unsplash

By Martha Sprackland

Carol

The village stream will fall asleep

still running but as thickened silk

falling light from St George church

is stopping up the culvert mouth

below the lid the turning eye

the cot of mud the frozen sky

What a concept

the new year still in draft, still

something of an abstraction

and quite unknowable. I’m eager,

though a friend texts: The last one

didn’t seem to merit a sequel. Alright,

but (cautiously) this could be

my life’s do-over. An intention

flips identically within the shoal,

my heart’s administration lax

on paperwork, but here the garment

gapes a little, unbuttoned, giving

onto – if not redemption,

then this soft esoteric prospect.

New Gods

He bolts the twin doors, shuts fire

under the mountain’s cap, tenuous as sleep.

The villagers hand-to-hand valuables

in clean white cloth, offerings up the winding stair.

Must be they both feared and wished

this gold eye rolling, opening.

Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Citadel (Pavilion, 2020) was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award; a new collection is forthcoming in 2027. Martha teaches for Arvon, where she is also a Trustee. Dark Night: Poems and Selected Prose, her new translation of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross, is published by Penguin Classics.