Liking Walking + Winterzeit

Two poems on the expansiveness of the night sky

Mark Saunders is a writer and teacher living on the Isle of Wight in the UK. He has been published in Abridged Magazine, emagazine, Meniscus Literary Journal, Spelt Magazine and by Oxford University Press.

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Liking Walking

For one moment you think 
knowing the mind of God
will be like a video shot 
without tape or silvering

like a moment to wrap mirrors 
round and live within
forever — a shut-in night 
of blissed-out lanes, wandering

like an insect coaxed hand 
to hand and onward, turned 
over infinitely, infinitely its own
memory — its own thoughts

like a sense of sharp starlight
in the dew-lifted wetness
of full dark, with the hedgerows
narrowing, never met.

Winterzeit

The programme says piano
recitals and medical research
and generous applause go
hand in hand, that such
pleasure we know now
as red blood quickening is much
more than just tempo

and melody.
Night driving out
through snow, the valley
had it too in the road rut
rhythm and the bluish play

of headlamps startling us
and dipped in time — that same
compassion to reach and press
and hold the beam
until we pass —
our dashes almost palm to palm
at last

and weightless. Then the slower
movement starts, the dark
passage pedalling star by star
and spun: chromatic, moonstruck,
like searchlights numbing air.

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