Three Poems by Christopher Hopkins

The Last Time The Ground Will Give


The day light has aged.
Time has been called, by the nature of things.
The sky did build its temper,
and howled in breaking.
Earths firm to clay,
idle under nail and a heavy sun.

The silk heads of the wheat were taken in,
and the straw ends left, waiting to be turned.
Tiger chars stripped crates arrived,
stacked by the heavy squat limbs,
waiting for the hired hands to come,
rose halves still bleaching in cross winds.

All that vigour of the term,
soaked up in the flesh and grain.

I hear the share,
won't break the earth this year.
No dragging boards, no folds to air,
no crows to pick the worms.
The rumours heard of silver bones,
stilted and hammock strung,
appeared from horizon stills.
Standing guard over wasp toned diggers,
their blue diesel genies follow,
and the crows,
who don't care where the worms come from.

Tank hard and shovel hands
turn up the downs,
to the blue moon paper plans.
The authentic, made a desire,
a manageable one,
for brass letter boxes
and the furniture overtures that come.
Blossom scent from washing lines,
and greenhouse fruits that rot on the vine.





Technomediacid

the electric fog
keeps me from sleep

my head
among the clouds

half truths
in the half light

holding hands
with the zeros and ones

staring down
an electron gun





Date at the seafront

A hundred thousand smashing plates.
That’s how it sounded when the waves came over.

The noise, it didn't stop.

The sea and the sky
both a churned up grey,
white foam manes on the fold.

You held my hand.
Icicle fingers around mine.
You kissed me
and I felt your cold nose.

I liked your bobble hat.

The sand drifts on the promenade whipped up,
and some of it got in our mouths.

It danced around, around our feet,
and puffed out our coats and chests.
Us careless little devils.



Bio: Christopher Hopkins, was born and raised in Neath South Wales, surrounded by machines and mountains, until he moved to Oxford in his early twenties. He currently resides in Canterbury and works for the NHS. Chris, who claims poetry has been "my ladder out of some dark places" has had poems published in Rust & Moth Magazine, Tuck Magazine, the online literary journal 1947, Transcendent Zero Press and Duane's PoeTree. Two of his early e-book pamphlets "Imagination is my Gun" and "Exit From a Moving Car" are available on Amazon.