Orphan

Poetry is the orphan of silence
Begging for attention
Word spaces and line breaks
Her crutches

Whatever the poem describes to you
Is a shadow
A portion, a flavour
Of what the poet is trying to say

Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond

This poem was first published at:  https://vitabrevisliterature.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/orphan/

Drifts

Nebulaic drift of space glows pregnant with stars
Pulsates with unseen radiation, reflects light upon broken hulls
Billowing gases thread through holes laced by stellar blasts
Huge gas pillars glow with the light from star birth

Strange shapes eclipse the details of nebulaic magnificence
Ships riddled by particle winds after a disaster deep in spacetime
Now drift in loose orbits within a mystery, artefacts lost to sentience and story
Deep in the cloud lies a graveyard drifting to gravity’s pale tune

Gas jets burst from infant stars, glow in unseen colours
Shoot forth ionized subatomic debris
Push against torn metal, shifting orbits, prompting collisions
Against desiccated limbs, simulating life once more

The beings who struggled and died here disassociate and powder to dust
Microbes drift and seed, await rebirth in planetary clouds
Amino acids alter with the alien input
Nucleotides drift forward to the future

Ghost DNA haunts the spaces between worlds
Drifts onto comet sand meteors
Drops into planetary atmospheres
Visits us tonight as it has done before

Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond

This poem was first published at: https://inbetweenhangovers.wordpress.com/2016/12/18/drifts-by-kim-whysall-hammond/

His Pencil

It is missing him I can tell
mourning his deft touch, firm but gentle hold

It has been in the filing cabinet drawer
in a muddle of discarded stationery
since the world
as I planned it
ended

It asks for Dad, but I cannot say where he is
instead I ask it about the last drawing it made
and it trembles, remembering pudgy three year old fingers
clutching it as they outlined a tigers sharp teeth

I was hoping for a memory of Dads art
as most of it is as gone
as he is

Then it tells me of the many years
stuffed in a drawer of tools
in the house I grew up in
where it and Dad
learned to forget what they had done together
in that glowing youth of expectations
and dreams

All too soon I will be older than
Dad was when he was taken
in the meantime his pencil and I
make new memories

Copyright © 2023 Kim Whysall-Hammond

Dizzy with Time

Dust motes in sunlight freckle your face
as we kiss deep in bracken on a Welsh hill
a long way from home.
I will leave my bag there
to be retrieved in darkness and laughter
long hours later.
If I had to describe this
it would be joy crackling in heat
dizzy with all the time in the world.

Copyright © 2021 Kim Whysall-Hammond

This poem was first published by Oddball, in December 2021

Did rain ever engender a monster so?

Rain in Geneva
no place to go
no time alone with those egos
too long with Byron
and the risk that

Frustrated that he cannot seduce you
he may go for your husband instead
no loss you think
as you weary of his tales that always come back to
his exploits

Who proposed ghost stories?
you don’t need ghosts
you are trapped with a monster
trapped, telling tales to a mad man
so you trap time
make something transcendent
a myth for our times

We are all Frankensteins children

Copyright © 2022 Kim Whysall-Hammond

For Mary Shelley