Night Feed with Summer Solstice
Are they different, the winter’s children?
Held tighter in the diurnal maw? Light
stirred less thick in the blood?
Two hours across the squandering dawn
I’ve tricked this ounce of milk to the small cave
in the pebble of your gut, and what luck
the day we’re growing into
― the peach of it, the dove coo’d size of the thing
rearing up improbable as a giraffe’s head
all eyes and wide cheeked in her stall.
Morning
and somewhere else night falls
on the other side of the year. Our days
lessen while theirs unfrond.
Things tip inevitably back to the centre
this room, the hour. Awake
my long breath in your ear calms you.
Yours is hot and short in mine.
…
Luke Palmer’s debut pamphlet, Spring in the Hospital, won the Prole Pamphlet Competition in 2018. He won third prize in the Winchester Poetry Competition this year, and his debut YA novel, Grow (Firefly Press), will arrive in July 2021.
atriumpoetry.com 