Autumn
There’s nothing mellow about my autumn
I’ll rage like Dylan’s father
against the coming of the dark.
Bright red as a maple leaf, I’ll dance
a dervish whirl through the air
I’ll not lie in the mud and rain
beneath your feet
sodden and brown.
Let me go out in a bonfire’s flame
the pain may be bad but
it won’t last long. I’ll rise
flying upwards in fiery sparks
before falling like ash
on your hair.
© Miriam Hastings
Insomnia in the city
The fan whirs, 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. 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
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