WEEPING SILENCES OF FRAGILE THINGS by Martins Deep
BEADS by Ingrid Leonard
The dawn of the second millennium BC and a girl and her brothers linger at the beach. The wind’s long sigh is cold on their shoulders and they move sunwards, racing the fading twilight to the ruins of houses they spy at bay’s end.
Inside, the walls are thicker than arm-span; hallways capped with brig-stone give ready shelter between clearings open to skat and sleet. They unpack a fire-kit of blubber and kindling, set their knives to skinning. Soon, their bellies are full of grilled fish, they drain their skins of water.
The girl shaves a torch from the fire and they move between chambers. The younger boy finds a bone necklace, lifts it over the head of his sister. It leaves an empty curve in its beaded bed.
The older boy’s blade is alive with firelight. The necklace is foreign around the neck of his sister, a storm brews in his blood. He will earn for her a treasure of coin-wrought carvings, strung on a gleaming strand. He cuts the leather. A coil of moon-discs falls, lies still in the broken hallway.
*
The man who made the necklace had sought
to honour his wife. Night after clear winter night
she would dress in her furs to greet the moonrise
that lit her breath as she sang to it, grown fat
and waxy six-fold before he had flattened
and polished each bead to lie pale
around her neck, so even in storms
she would wear the moon’s milk discs.
In the years after her death he would bring
her bones, cleansed and purified, to the lip
of the howe to be hallowed by the sun
at mid-winter. But he broke with custom too,
for on those nights when a skare moon rose,
he would set her before it and sing
in low burr to her reliving in the breaking
of tides, the smashing of stars.
Ingrid Leonard comes from Orkney, a group of islands off the north coast of Scotland, which inspires much of her poetry. She has an MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University and her poems have appeared in Brittle Star, Northwords Now, The Interpreter’s House and New Writing Scotland. Her poem ‘What the dawn taught me’ came third in the Ver Poets Open Competition 2020.
Martins Deep is a Nigerian poet & photographer. He is passionate about documenting muffled stories of the African experience in his poetry & visual art. Writing from Kaduna, or whichever place he finds himself, the acrylic of inspiration that spills from his innermost being tends to paint various depictions of humanity/life in his environment. His creative works have appeared, or are forthcoming on Barren Magazine, Chestnut Review, Mineral Lit Mag, Agbowó Magazine, Inklette, Surburban Review, The Alchemy Spoon, Dream Glow, The Lumiere Review, Variant Literature, & elsewhere. He is also the brain behind Shotstoryz Photography and can be reached on Twitter: @martinsdeep1