Two poems that explore our pre-history are featured this month. Originally from Wales, Iris Anne Lewis now lives in Kempsford, Gloucestershire. She has written short stories and a couple of radio plays (broadcast on Corinium Radio). Her main focus is writing poetry. Her work has been published in respected poetry magazines, most recently in Artemis, Black Bough Poetry, Ink, Sweat and Tears and The High Window. In 2020 her work was showcased on the Silver Branch Series on Black Bough Poetry. She also won 1st prize in the Gloucestershire Poetry Competition and made her sixth appearance at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival as a prize winner.
Iris’s poems ‘SwanSong in the Geissenklösterle Cave’ and ‘The White Horse of Uffington’ are published below.
More work by Iris and other local writers can be found at www.somewhere-else-writers.org.
Swan Song in the Geissenklösterle Cave
His fingers hold the bone
of my wing, carve holes.
Firelight flickers around rock walls.
He brings me to his mouth, gently blows.
Breath on bone flows.
Melody flutes through the cave.
Mute no longer, I sing.
Iris Anne Lewis
The White Horse of Uffington
Ancient litanies, wind-thin,
whistle round the coombs
of Dragon Hill.
Antler picks, flint knives,
bronze-headed axes
cut and gouge the chalk.
*
In a half-remembered ritual,
men and women in
jeans and tee-shirts
gather and kneel.
Now tools of steel
hammer the chalk,
sculpt the goddess,
scour the horse.
Iris Anne Lewis
Both poems were featured in the Silver Branch series of Black Bough Poetry and first published in ‘Deep Time’ volumes one and two.
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