Louise Longson
Preying (for the rain) Water beats slapping roofs like the hoof-stamp tramp of pilgrims’ sandalled feet, like a prayer it spouts in angel-tongues from throats of gutters choked with leaves and sphagnum moss, slaking itself into puddles of mud. Cobblestone eyes shine with treachery—a slick sly sideways glance— waiting for the fall.
Anchorite What can I tell you about the night? That it is cold. The air shivers dark on my skin and my eyes tearing up the sky where a venerable moon consecrates the stars. That it is lonely. No more than this cell, a small, shuttered space. I made a vow to give myself stability of place, where an oblique window squints into each translucent day. That it is a blind door. It is a way to silent- entranced worlds, where a sense of being is reborn from the immortal stillness of stone, a womb that bears the new dawn, when all manner of things shall be well. Louise says of herself on her website: A late-blooming poet, I started writing ‘with intent’ in 2020. Now aged 60-and-counting, I have been widely published both in print and online, and have authored two chapbooks (12 & 17 poems respectively), Hanging Fire (Dreich Publications, 2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). My larger collection (42 poems), These are her thoughts as she falls, won the inaugural biennial Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Literary Prize in 2023, the year I was also nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Dust Poetry Magazine. I work from my home in a small rural village on the fringes of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire for a registered charity that offers a listening service to people whose physical and emotional distress is caused by loneliness and historic trauma and abuse. My poems are inspired by bringing together my personal and work experiences, often seen through the twin prisms of myth and nature. Many of them are published here. I hope you enjoy them. I am on Twitter (which I cannot ever see myself as referring to as ‘X’) @LouisePoetical and I am on Facebook.