Dust

 

This old house hangs on to its dust.

The chimney hoards a dark cloud,

trickles it into a clean grate, just brushed.

Floorboards creak and gape, lie proud

of their age, count years in footsteps;       

button boots, silk slippers, loud hobnails, stout

oxfords. They whisper dust on newly swept

floors, protest at the absence of maids,

watch the corners gather new cobwebs.

The house calls to dust at every chance and waits

for the door stood open on a summer night,

for the letterbox gaping for long-awaited mail.

The packed shelves conspire to hide

what’s held behind each remembered book

and all attempts to thin them out, denied.

 

 

 

To name the dark

 

Lie on the earth in darkness, feel gravity

hold you while you look up into the bowl

of the night sky.

                  We speak of darkness growing

or gathering as if to harvest it and make it ours,

draw lines between stars, make shapes of them,

name them to a size we can survive.

                   Immense, they burn indifferent

to our small noises, fade only in our sight   

when we make lights to baffle the dark.

 

We impose our small gods on everything

around us, diminishing to human size

anything that threatens our importance.

It is as if we can’t trust this small planet

to hold us in place,

                    as if we might get swept up

to what lies beyond, which we cannot name.

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Angela France has had poems published in many leading journals and has been anthologised a number of times, her fifth collection Terminarchy was published in 2021. Angela teaches creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire and in community settings. She leads the longest running reading series in Cheltenham, ‘Buzzwords’.