Laura Potts
Photographs
Their eyes I remember globes glass
in a camera, their past like an estuary light
in the dark. Sparks from the stars
are chiming here, chandeliers
from streetlamps in the park
mapping their own boulevard,
the night hours long and in love,
their life in their arms. Nightjars
on the lid of the pool, still bright:
the ghosts of a past
where there is always a light.
Away from then they are thirty years,
motherwit a candle in her eyes. Here
for the sleeper with his old wise light
the sun kicks spangles, coins bright
as the yesterday full in his smile.
The past, meanwhile,
a lukewarm light on their lips
at the edge of their sleep, something lit
by a childhood ballroom. I remember the moon,
a candlesworth of film hung on its spool,
when we sat in that park, the garden asleep,
the stars that fizzed in the deep hot dark
still holding their breath for you.
About the writer:
Laura Potts has twice been named a London Foyle Young Poet of the Year and Young Writer. In 2013 she became an Arts Council Northern Voices poet and Lieder Poet at the University of Leeds. Her poems have appeared in Seamus Heaney’s Agenda, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Interpreter’s House. Having studied at The University of Cape Town and worked at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace in Swansea, Laura has recently become Agenda’s Young TS Eliot Poet and been shortlisted for a Charter-Oak Award for Best Historical Fiction in Colorado. This year Laura was shortlisted in The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize, was named one of The Poetry Business’ New Poets, and became a BBC New Voice for 2017. Her first BBC radio drama Sweet The Mourning Dew aired at Christmas 2017.
Image: Untitled from The Art of Things series by Gerard Cadevall Daniel. Fine art photograph. No technical information specified. No completion date specified. By permission.
