Advent

The lane dips and turns
winding up through trees –
something like daylight waits
beyond the forest’s edge.

Sunless blocks are all you see
before an angle in the town
where a view of hills appears
and purple moorland beckons.

Winter mornings on a bus,
he passes on a skateboard –
speed and ice and misted breath,
an old scarf fluttering behind.

Each morning a narrow kitchen
rises in the yard, anticipating
dawn, and they can hardly wait
to open the twenty-fifth door.

Day Trip

The fossils are moving, / Coiling, crawling, / Aching for the sea. — Norman Nicholson

Way back, in December, I thought I’d heard
a shuffling in the rockery, but it was ice
that moved, that creaked beneath my shoe.

Mid-winter still: cold earth remains ungiving.
Quick air should be fragrant with woodsmoke,
but we wear bright gloves and gather near cars.

Somebody says that what with all the fossils
trying to get back to the sea, it’s hardly surprising
the Earth spins and tides judder in our bones.

We drive in silence to the coast, sense nothing
words can tell, gliding down the throat of a valley
whose mouth is a chalice of glittering bay.

Oliver Comins recently moved back to Warwickshire after living in various parts of the Thames Valley for quite a number of years. His poems are available in print and online and in short collections from Mandeville Press and Templar Poetry. A full length collection, Oak Fish Island, was published in 2018, also by Templar.