Outside the sky has shifted to tin, but the rain holds off even as the clouds buckle thick bellies heavy against the horizon, beached mothers in their slow, sloping movements. A tremor that might be a plane, or a kick, or my imagination is proof enough of life. I needed proof today. The world has emptied, drained out while I slept still damp along the edges but vacant. I need the sky to fill me up.
After chapter six I get distracted, put the book down, and leave it on a shelf with likeminded volumes of good intentions I mean to come back to. Ursa Major makes a den for itself among scattered thoughts hibernates until night unfolds, then The Great Bear yawns stirs like memory and steps into the sky. It takes the right kind of observation, to find binary stars. They huddle so close that they obscure their own pairings, burn as a single pinpoint to the naked eye. Two magnitudes in perpetual orbit, moving as one, two halves of a whole, it is easy to paint a romance on devotion so far removed. Our sun is solitary, though not extraordinarily so, or oddly so. Stars (I read) are loners just as often as couples And it makes no difference to their brightness. There is nothing wrong with a little loneliness. Sometimes the only light you need is the one you hold sometimes space is what makes you seen.
There were no feathers, though my father looked torch an oily, smoking star he bid me follow north. We found bones. Cracked open for their marrow, stacked in heaps against the walls too brittle to be clever no matter how my father willed it. He took one with a sharpened end kept it in his palm, even while we slept. I knew he feared the dark. We ate beef, until the maggots set in and then we built ourselves an escape from the ruins of its ribcage. No feathers, only broken bone. No feathers, only broken hope.
We’re almost halfway through June. How did that happen?
The month kicked off with a poetry at the Button Warehouse. (Normally hosted by Joy Winkler but covered this month by John Lindley). Angela Topping was guest poet, and gave fantastic readings at the start of each half from her various collections. Then the evening was turned over to the open mic, and I ended up closing the evening out with ‘Legs Eleven’ from my collection ‘It’s All In The Blood’. This was probably my favourite performance of the year so far as the atmosphere was fantastic, I made it through the poem without stumbling, and even sold a copy of my book.
Does poetry need to rhyme? I’ve touched on this topic before and received quite a bit of feedback from other poets on WordPress, more so than I would normally receive on these style of posts. It’s a conversation that sparks debate in poetry groups of Facebook as well. I notice it cropping up when poets are asked “what piece of feedback have you received and chosen to ignore.”
In secondary school, I started writing poetry and I shared one of my poems with a friend. Her response was limited to ‘it doesn’t rhyme’, and with that she declared it wasn’t really a poem. It was an experience that taught me how black and white opinions around art can be. Something is a poem, or it isn’t, and the criteria to make it so is very specific. In reality, poetry occupies a strange spectrum where the style on one end, is utterly removed from the style at the other. Everything in-between is still poetry.
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Carol J Forrester 
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