Two poems by Steven Milne

Road Accident

• A night of glassy ghosts in the meadows.
• A black night of ice and rain,
• winter’s voltage set hard to stun, the earth
• hammered into unpredictable motion.

• The road was closed, I later found, by death.
• By broken glass and metal frail as flowers
• wrapped around the branches of a cherry.

• If I had cared less, it could have been us,
• a red wreath burning like Sirius,
• star at the side of your head, halo of blood
• like petals on the undemonstrative lane.

• Instead it was our neighbor, a simple man
• whose life was unhallowed, whose wife broke down
• and crumpled like a pillow, impotent

• against grief, the exhumation of her fears
• and the ancient language of ice and fire.

Horses

• For Ellie

• The sun hunts them like ghosts in the trees.
• Bramble and thorn cradle their lost earth,
• the palaeography of their flesh
• and its fossil bones streaming with light.

• In their dark skulls, thunder bleeds
• like fields that have broken their hooves,
• their stray foals Jurassic as ferns,
• leaf-whispers between forest and plain.

• Unwavering, they gather to a stillness,
• echo of an arcane myth,
• translators of the divine solace.
• Their touch brings the wounded, running through time.

Stephen Milne lives and works in Lincolnshire in the United Kingdom. He has been previously published in a number of small magazines and journals and is married with six children. He is planning to release his first volume of poems, entitled Moorings, later this year.