Skylark, Vol. 7, Number 1, Summer 2019

a century ago,
the Iolaire foundered . . .
my cousin's paintings
bring those who were lost
home to their families


Note: My cousin, Margaret Ferguson, an artist and doctor living on the Isle of Lewis, painted over 100 commemorative portraits of the men who perished in the Iolaire tragedy on New Year's Day, 1919.


here, and yet, not quite


a ghost train
of fog skims across
the lake . . .
at our next visit,
I hope you will know me

for a moment,
two waterspouts dance
across the lake . . .
I still feel your hand
on the small of my back

Note: In a review of Stacking Stones: An Anthology of Short Tanka Sequences (editor M. Kei), Jenny Ward Angyal makes mention of the following tanka from my sequence 'lightfall':


black swans
softening the edges
of my darkness
I gather threads of light
unspooling in their wake


Jenny goes on to say:

'Threads of light' run throughout the wonderful variety of voices and styles, content and form to be found in this volume, as poets explore the labyrinth of human life, erecting as they go small monuments of words to mark the way.