Category Archives: poetry

A shark on retreat

Posted on October 1, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

They say that a shark will die if it does not keep swimming. Invited into stillness and silence, I notice the tremor in my legs, swaying to and fro, dancing without rhythm to an unheard tune; the heaviness of tongue … Continue reading →

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Father, forgive

Posted on August 24, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

An inadequate poem after visiting St Michael’s Mount and encountering Lyn Constable Maxwell’s bronze of the Archangel in the island church. Continue reading →

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Liberty is praying Psalm 93

Posted on July 24, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Alone against the storm-wrecked sky she stands; her untired arm lifts up her light to greet the lightning flashing from on high, though to admonish or illuminate is in the beholder’s eye; her face is streaming, rivets making rivulets to multiply and fall, but for whom … Continue reading →

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Decentering

Posted on June 29, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

My grandmother was born in the Victorian age, half a United States of America ago and an ocean of war and plunder away; in the span of creation less than the blink of an eyelash. Such is living memory, expanding … Continue reading →

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A little life

Posted on June 21, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Heron was back at the Lake tonight, along with ten thousand mayflies strewn across the surface like petals, wings still spread as though for flight, and I, no doubt with several pressed to my bosom like a medieval lover with … Continue reading →

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Memento mori at the beach

Posted on June 14, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Smoothed out by the shore, the rough and tumble of sea and sand, the bone of a water bird, its bill intact, eye empty and inviting. All trace of the violence of life and death has been polished away by the grinding mortality of time and this … Continue reading →

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Incongruity (or, Fireworks at Pentecost)

Posted on May 21, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

No gentle breeze to nurse the flames but a gust, a buffet that knocks out other sources of power, so that all we see is one another’s wonder by light of a fire that reveals, does not obliterate the features … Continue reading →

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Beyond the borders

Posted on May 8, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Beyond the borders of my body lie a floor in need of sweeping, a piano that needs playing, a spider that I saw while making tea, birds that want feeding, though the last creature seen there was a long-fingered raccoon, scooping handfuls of seed into its joyful … Continue reading →

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If these were quiet …

Posted on March 25, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

Think of the palms, crushed and bruised by the colt and the crowds, and of the ones who came back, the poor, the quiet, who came back to collect their broken stems and bleeding leaves, and wove them into something new, something to sell back to … Continue reading →

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God’s time

Posted on March 20, 2026 by Rosalind C Hughes

His last breath took him by surprise. Until its vapour dissipated in the ragged inhalations of his sisters, beginnings to convert his death into ululation; until then, he had thought that he would come. Hard to say what happened next: … Continue reading →

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