Lauren Thomas - Crown of Sonnets
Content Warning: loss
Alba
I try to chart your absence in the dark
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Feint voltage flickering the pulse of time
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Across the vast, lost regions of the night
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A sun edged ghost billowing the sky
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To stare into the socket of the earth
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Track scars of seas, their frozen heave and crawl
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Gives rise to seas within me, as I kneel
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My hands like hymns working the night soil
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Planting under seasons of the moon
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The matter of your body, smooth as seed
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Exists at once, all amongst the stars
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Their tiny lights refract you endlessly
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When she wanes the meaning surely comes
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Alba greets her there, whispering from bulbs
Blast
Alba flowers whispering from bulbs,
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Where soil coils silence underneath the black,
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Know, deep below a different world beats on,
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As far above her reticence hums back.
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You are fragments cratered in her skin.
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In drifts of space, your body, was the blast.
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Your form was carried on the solar wind,
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Your core collapsing into neutron stars.
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I sit with absence rippling the dark,
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Each night to plant, as lunation allows.
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A ritual, a midnight almanac,
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A longing grown beneath her orb in rows.
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She wrote the silver dawn of all the worlds
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And through the earth we learn to live loss first.
Phase
As seasons turn, we have to live them first.
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Borne from slow moon tides beneath the earth,
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Panicles of loved reach from wastes of lost,
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Luminous they bough beneath her curve.
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Such insistent darkness at her brow,
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In the end, gives way to broken sky.
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Rifts of rising colour tether day
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To the waning hours with flaming ties.
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She is muted distance through her veil.
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She is silence in the blossoms falling.
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She is light dispersed through vapour trails.
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She is the grey hazed garden of our morning.
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At last, she rises on days fading arc
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And I return your absence to the dark.
Lauren Thomas likes to write about the natural world, time, memory and stories from the past. Her work can be found in various print and online publications, most recently including, Abridged, Re-side magazine, Nine Pens Hair Raising anthology and Green Ink Poetry. She has work forthcoming in Black Bough poetry and Magma. Her pamphlet, Silver Hare Tales, will be published in December 2021 with Blood Moon Poetry Press. Twitter:@laurenmywrites
Cover Artwork: Carolina Moonrise by M Patrick Riggin
M Patrick Riggin is a Pittsburgh born writer, artist and musician. While attending college for journalism and history, he worked as a musician and painter. His work has been featured in several publications and he continues to evolve his form and function of artistic expression. To follow him on his artistic journey, M Patrick Riggin can be reached at mpatrickriggin.com.