Holly

Laura Potts

In a suitcase your years at the lit bus stop.
Laughing loud and long, the top
of your lungs a screaming fox,
you had stopped to tell me you were gone.

Yesterday a word dark on your lips. Chips
I remember we split in the rain, a fizzing
last laugh in a childhood lane, smacking
our knees as the trees threw their bats.

Again as the streetlamps hung in their hats
I remembered we dreamed at the back
of a class a lost and dizzy tomorrow.
Remember that? Most of those stars left long ago.

Holly. The river has forgotten your name. No,
your broken light the same to me,
cracked black by the decades we did not see
from your garden gloam. That night as I walked

the last mile home a scrap of your laugh clung
to the wind and your bicycle bell, fifty years long,
thinned to a song I have heard since then, your afterglow
gone. Do you remember the thunder like a great Amen?

I looked on.

 
 
 

about the writer

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Laura Potts has twice been named a Foyle Young Poet and lives in West Yorkshire. Her poems have appeared in Seamus Heaney’s Agenda,The Interpreter’s House and Poetry Salzburg Review. Having studied at The University of Cape Town and worked at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace, Laura has recently been shortlisted for a Charter-Oak Award for Best Historical Fiction and won a Shadow Award in America. This year she became one of The Poetry Business’ New Poets and a BBC New Voice for 2017. Her first BBC radio drama Sweet The Mourning Dew will air from Sage Gateshead in 2018.