Issue #25.6 A Double Issue: Gunilla T. Kester and Simon Ravenscroft
A Poem by Gunilla T. Kester
Better Not
Better not return to the old ways when we knew where we and others we met grew up by their pronounced or swallowed vowels, consonants, making them buzz, burr, brighten or zip our ears with a clang, or their manners, a certain hand gesture older than Alexander the Great and most of all the shoes, those old gossips.
At the grill bar by the train-station we laughed at the robust ugly shoes of the Americans yet gave them beer so they would talk to us: English, the gate and the port to out and away. At night we drove to the local airport and sat in the empty bleachers and waved at the planes, dreaming of America, large brown paper bags filled with food we saw and smelled in the movies.
Coming home, the sad drinking man had tripped on our doorstep again, was bloody and weeping. Better not feel again stones so old they grow like cold skin. Trees wrapped in furs. Clouds kissing windows and smoking on balconies. Copper roofs climbing slowly toward heaven. Grass locked under leaves, a hidden fugitive. Oh, City of Youth —in my mind you hold me still.
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Swedish-born Gunilla Theander Kester is an award-winning poet and the author of If I Were More Like Myself (The Writer's Den, 2015). Her two poetry chapbooks: Mysteries I-XXIII (2011) and Time of Sand and Teeth (2009) were published by Finishing Line Press. She was co-editor with Gary Earl Ross of The Still Empty Chair: More Writings Inspired by Flight 3407 (2011) and The Empty Chair: Love and Loss in the Wake of Flight 3407 (2010). Dr. Kester has published many poems in Swedish anthologies and magazines, including Bonniers Litterära Magasin. She lives near Buffalo, NY where she teaches classical guitar.
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A Poem by Simon Ravenscroft
The Waters of the Lower Palaeolithic
Found in situ: an ovate handaxe, a thinning flake, a scraper, a hammerstone and fragments, a retouched flint flake. Evidence suggests the prevalence in these parts of alder and pine, with areas of oak, elm, and hornbeam. Galingale, buttercup, and nettle made a home in the fen and the reedswamp, company for water-starwort, water lilies, bulrushes, and others. Chillier by 3° C. A million years, give or take, have slipped by.
Today the fields around Grantchester still flood from time to time. The meadows turn to glass and the sky is in them, like the past. All the light is changed. Tame dogs burst through the shallow floodwaters in chase of sticks. Photographers appear in waders, paparazzi for the egret and cormorant. We are told that cranes are returning, slowly, and the eagle of the white tail, seen even inland near St Edmundsbury. I am from the Vale of White Horse and miss those hills in this flat country but I love how the light plays on the sheets of watery glass when the flat land floods, making it into a mirror of heaven.
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Simon Ravenscroft lives in Cambridge, England, and teaches and writes in the arts and humanities. He is a Fellow of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. He has published variously, and recent work has appeared at Meniscus, Red Ogre Review, Swifts & Slows quarterly, JAKE, Roi Fainéant, and Ink Sweat & Tears, among others.
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