Insomnia in the city

 

 The fan whirrs, muffling the sounds

 of the city, but still they seep

 like heat through the open window.

 Sirens wail and the scream

 of a car alarm carried through

 the stillness,

the hot night air.

 Sudden shouting, footsteps running

 on tarmac, then laughter

 bitter and hard, rattling

 against an alley wall like stones

 shaken

in a tin.

 A fox barks, and the vixen

 just beneath the window

 answers him, in the morning

 soiled nappies, polystyrene

 cartons lie abandoned

 by dustbins, discarded

 beneath cars.

 

     Copyright © Miriam Hastings

 

 

 

Mother and Daughter:

 Demeter - Persephone.

 

She walks the empty earth

tears bitter, freeze as they fall

forming shapes, strange

beautiful, inimitable as a child.

The first snow baptising

the earth into a new age

a hard beginning

a deadly winter.

 

The weight of her grief

burdens the earth as she walks

her feet crushing life

beneath them.  She bore a child,

racked body labouring.  This new pain

racks her mind, a loss abortive,

bitter as stillbirth, the rape

of her daughter.

 

Snow like a blanket

muffles the earth, thawing

the iron hard soil, warming

the girl entombed deep below,

blood stabbing through veins

painful as birth, she forces her way

from earth’s dark core, clawing

ever higher

 

through frozen ground, limbs

rigid, stiff with ice.  Dragged

from her lover,

she staggers like a ghost

across snow-white wastes.

Called from the dead, undead

she comes, hunting

her mother.

 

Copyright © Miriam Hastings