Sarah James & Dan Haynes
![]()
The Startling
Not a star in the sky brushed darker
by trees grown to dandelion clocks.
Gravestones are scattered like a shock
of bunnies turned white tail,
                                                        a burst
of night mushrooms from spread roots,
or the edge where woven threads
start to work loose.
                                       The cross caught
in our flashlight is a granite ghost, stiff
with fright.
                     Distant in this frayed
forest, a deer’s weft blur;
the time in its mouth
wet as rain-soft grass.
Sometimes startled, sometimes heartened. Sarah James's latest narrative in poems The Magnetic Diaries is published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press and she has a poetry collection, plenty-fish, out with Nine Arches Press summer 2015. Her first collection, Into the Yell, (Circaidy Gregory Press) won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards 2011. Her website is at: www.sarah-james.co.uk.
Dan Haynes is a landscape and night photographer from Macclesfield, Cheshire,on the edge of the Peak District in the North West of England. He is a keen hiker, which goes hand in hand with the type of work he likes to produce, working with light and shadow to illuminate a landscape scene. Also a keen night photographer, Dan enjoys using low light to change an otherwise ordinary scene.
previous page     contents     next page
Grave Encounters
The Startling
Not a star in the sky brushed darker
by trees grown to dandelion clocks.
Gravestones are scattered like a shock
of bunnies turned white tail,
                                                        a burst
of night mushrooms from spread roots,
or the edge where woven threads
start to work loose.
                                       The cross caught
in our flashlight is a granite ghost, stiff
with fright.
                     Distant in this frayed
forest, a deer’s weft blur;
the time in its mouth
wet as rain-soft grass.
Sometimes startled, sometimes heartened. Sarah James's latest narrative in poems The Magnetic Diaries is published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press and she has a poetry collection, plenty-fish, out with Nine Arches Press summer 2015. Her first collection, Into the Yell, (Circaidy Gregory Press) won third prize in the International Rubery Book Awards 2011. Her website is at: www.sarah-james.co.uk.
Dan Haynes is a landscape and night photographer from Macclesfield, Cheshire,on the edge of the Peak District in the North West of England. He is a keen hiker, which goes hand in hand with the type of work he likes to produce, working with light and shadow to illuminate a landscape scene. Also a keen night photographer, Dan enjoys using low light to change an otherwise ordinary scene.