Ruth Aylett – “February Beach”

February Beach

It’s a toe-stumble over the beach-top rocks.
Dry sand blows in low veils, the sea’s
withdrawn into a horizon mutter.

‘It’s not what it was’ said the old lady
who once ran the beach café,
‘not what it was’. Her old hut burned down,

now rebuilt in heritage stone. Sells
cheese toasties and plastic pasties.
No more genteel china cups and cakes.

A sudden transverse dog gallops,
here-and-gone, with ecstatic pant
brown eyes fixed on phantom prey.

Yesterday’s churned sand swept clean
by the morning tide, an unmarked distance
for filling, and for erasing.

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Ruth Aylett lives and works in Edinburgh and her poetry is widely published in magazines, both in print and online, and anthologies. She has been known to read her work with a robot. Her pamphlets Pretty in Pink (4Word) and Queen of Infinite Space (Maytree) were published in 2021. For more see https://ruthaylett.org

Ruth Aylett – “Transplant”

Transplant

A potted oleander, I stand
vertical by the doorframe
green leaved even in winter.

Once a small cutting
from a mother plant in France.
Rooted and watered

I tip-reach for the sun
as it just clears the tenements
in this Scottish winter.

Witnessing the same sky
as there in the south,
where my mother still lives

though this sky is eggshell faded
from that deep blue brilliance,
and shadowed by shorter days.

Contained, I fill the earth below me,
create new branches.
At their ends, buds, pink flowers.

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Ruth Aylett lives and works in Edinburgh and has been known to perform readings with a robot. Her poetry is widely published in magazines and anthologies and her two pamphlets, Pretty in Pink (4Word) and Queen of Infinite Space (Maytree), were published in 2021. For more see http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~ruth/writing.html