Photograph
Poet: William Bowden
Light leaks from the red bulb above,
bears down on plastic trays
sloshing with liquid as an image,
a fragment, gains strength &
recalls clarity as that black & transparent
liquid lures light from the celluloid,
grips it in a fist as a perilous mind
clings dearly to memory.
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Maybe four years old in a white
& cornflower blue summer blouse,
numb to the cold biting your ears,
you scream visibly, your cheeks
scored by hot, indignant tears,
a child abandoned in the woods.
Hardly woods! more an exoskeleton,
the fossil of a copse or shrubs clumped
together, now just detritus cutting furrows
in the cracked earth that yearns
beneath your feet.
William Bowden was born, and now lives, in London, having lived alternately in Cornwall, Kent and Wiltshire. Last year, he graduated from the University of Exeter with a first class degree in Literature and has had work published by Canon’s Mouth Magazine and the Crank.Â