Lorely Forrester was born in Kenya, raised in the Caribbean, graduated from King’s College London and lives in Ireland, although France remains her favourite holiday destination. Writing and gardening have both been central to her life since childhood. Editor/Feature Writer of Discover Sligo Magazine for many years, her poetry has appeared in various magazines & reviews, most recently The High Window, several times in The Galway Review, was long-listed for the Kilmore Quay Lit Festival Poetry Prize 2024, and her poem Planting Peonies has just won the Poetry Prize at Westport’s 49 th Annual International Literary and Arts Festival, Westival, October 2024.
Swift on the heels of night, the heat creeps
back, fans over flagstones, seeps into cracks,
slides unseen through green rosemary and
bay, stealing their perfume away. Then,
rising, stealthily slips through oleanders,
an invading force, just skirmishing at this
hour of the morning, but tracking its course
nonetheless, plundering scent and spilling it
wantonly over the lawn. Rising, still rising
and occupying, muting the crickets’ ceaseless
chant, it crushes the fresh hopes of morning
glory, flushed blue as the dawn, blushed
crimson with deep slanting veins; rushes
mimosas that instilled the night and the
breaking-light with long, soft murmuring.
The bats that swooped over the pool, scooping
cool water, ruling the dark, have fled, all fled:
refugees, they have crept to the airless eaves,
where late, frail roses, fresh from the sweet
respite of the night, retreat from the assaulting
heat into the secrecy of vine leaves, grieving their
pale petals, trailing down into the street.
Some will collude and collaborate with this daily
intruder: hot pink geraniums, their pots firing to
fever pitch, salute the sun, embrace the slatted slots
of light piercing the pergola. Primed and armoured
bees hurry to their habitual shrines, float over
fennel, worship the thyme, hallow their rituals
in the long blue throats of agapanthus; swifts,
soaring like Icarus, shriek in the nebulous air.
The Hunters
The valley berefts me. Sun-slashed sheer sides where hot
blue butterflies and lizards busy. Eerie-perched, I stare
through foreign glare. A thousand feet each way makes not
a jot of difference. Here the enclosing mountains wear
their carpet oaks and chestnuts like a patchwork skin,
only I am clinging. Parrot-screeching jays and a lazy, circling pair
of buzzards flirt the precipice, quarter the sky; and goat-thin
roads hairpin to cascades of water tumbling who knows where.
The hunters pass me on the lonely road, scorching with wild blue
figs and scabious. Their half-smile renders me a greedy child: my
cradled hoard of apples and bright chestnuts fatten and stuff
the boar they seek. Deep in the valley floor their dogs bark and bay
unseen, bells gaily ringing, and shots spin down, swift as the hand
of God. Those merry, blooded bells confound me all the day.
Poetry in this post: © Lorely Forrester
Published with the permission of Lorely Forrester