SUMMER’S EVE Daniel Kamaluddin (Year 13)
WANDERER Kit Parsons (Year 13) A dumb, dull man wanders lonely, And listens to a web of sound. They call him a mumbler only Who puts his feet, and mind down near the ground.
End of Summer. Weighty haze of midgeless sky pinches sharp on wrinkled skin where brow meets nose meets eyes. Orange heat expressing itself as amber; street- crack creeks and the balm sweat of sunset mirrors inside elbows. And nature all quiet, wasps whispering in the sun-bruised brush, larks and doves and robins folded up in the dusty disco ball shade. Cars screeching fits of heat-exhausted half-hearted rage. Trousered legs brushing crisp across the once-green grass and dried-up dirt. The drone of the bus going by, the breathy click of air conditioning and the intermittent hum of airplanes above, carting people off to greater sunshine, brighter dawns. And you, still amongst the grass and dust, think- ing of another orange land, of flat fields and clay cliffs, sunsets over still seas, sandy forests, tall yellow grass waning in the soft breeze, as you lie back amongst the crickets, deep in the heart of a field. A quintessence of peace; a restorative rest in a home for the heart.
His feet, his seekers in the rough terrain, Feeling little pebbles, fresh fanciful flowers, Wading through a blank cloud, even under rain. Unbothered by sun, moon, the call of night, He’ll wait a day or two to watch a kite, And widen his vision, those blind blue eyes To see a child’s wild surmise. Some say he’s myth, a legend in these parts, A man who never grew beyond such larks. Yet I, for one, who knows he’s gone, I feel him, When I seek the wooded plains and kiss them.
Artwork by Nathan Oforiokuma (Year 13)
FROM ENGLAND’S EDGE Alexander Poli (Year 13) It is dawn,
And grey gulls shout like fishwives in the sucking salt-grey ebb. One quits her post – dislodged by a temperamental wave, She leaps above the grasping spray to where, Beneath, It falls upon the pitch-black needled shore. The wind is salty and invigorating and bears her
from the samphire-scented sea ‘Til Dover is subsumed by cloud And sinks beneath the wash.
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THE ALLEYNIAN 712
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