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STOP PRESS…

Poets of the Month:
Mar 24

2023 Competition RESULTS

ARTEMIS
poetry Issue 29 extracts now online

ARTEMIS
poetry latest Issue, 30

ARTEMIS
poetry Guidelines

Listen to poems (latest by Gill Horitz, Gill Learner and Sarah Westcott)

latest Remote Workshop Endings, duo

Poets of the Month
(from Nov17)

Poem of the Month
(to Aug17)


 

POETRY COMPETITION 2023 RESULTS

*** Latest Remote Workshops: – ENDINGS
two complementary half-day workshops by Anne Stewart and Sarah Westcott ***

Latest publication: Siege and Symphony, by Myra Schneider. £9.95 see books

SECOND LIGHT ONLINE SHOP

Poets of the Month (& see sample poem below, by Veronica Zundel

Featured Poets, Mar 2024 straight to poems
 

Ann Milton, Not Drowning
Cathy Whittaker, My Father’s Desk
Elizabeth Soule, December 2011, a Memory of August 1968
Gill Fothergill, To Pam    The Neighbour I Have Never Met
Jean Atkin, Vik
June Webster, Cradle to Crib
Marg Roberts, Praise to the hawthorn on the boundary of Chandos Street car park
Ruth Sharman, Fragments
Veronica Zundel, Violins
 

 

Sample poem (selected at random)

Violins

The Dresden Philharmonic are playing Jewish violins,
salvaged somehow – who knows? – from the ashes of camps,
force-played by the inmates for their torturers’ amusement
 
If I forget you, O Jerusalem
 
and rebuilt by this Israeli man, speaking French, in whose eyes
is the clarity of devotion. He has done this for twenty years.
On one fiddleback, a swastika and ‘Heil Hitler’ had been drawn
 
Let my right hand lose its cunning
 
but who’s to say if the music dragged from these guts
is disturbing the dead, or lament, or the dare of resurrection?
Who has the right to tell?
 
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth
if I forget

 

Veronica Zundel

Note: poem based on a YouTube video

Poem published in Magma 75, 2019

 

Second Light Network – a network for women poets.