Tina Cole is a poet and reviewer who has led workshops with both adults and children. Her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines and collections. She is currently doing an M.A. in creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.
December and the almost scent of hyacinth is burgeoning
beneath the stairs alongside fermenting fruit. I am writing
a letter that fails to speak, my thoughts a hailstorm
of scraped knees and soured milk, the kindness that should
be mother. Time killing takes on a new meaning, my head
a snow globe, each random flake falling back and nothing
ending up where it used to be. Outside the wind is in a crazy
temper, roof slates embrace a new dimension, limbs of trees
relocate into the opaque sea of greenhouse. Its door unhinged.
Yesterday the garden was star salted, a first frost lidding
the earth, like you upstairs, door closed, refusing to communicate,
your grey-haired head suspended in a bowl of clouds. Silence
knew its place then, every morning at Sunday speed as you listened
for voices, grasped at silver fish stories, the past escaping
while you slept and our six white boned birches casting off leaves.
This poem won the Phare/Lighthouse Poetry Competition 2022.
Publications:
I Almost Knew You, 2015, createspace.com
Forged, 2015, Yaffle Press
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