Rosemary Appleton lives in Suffolk and writes in snatched moments, fuelled by coffee. She has twice been a winner of the Oxford Radcliffe Library Science & Poetry Prize and her work has appeared in Mslexia, The Fenland Reed, Black Bough Poems, The Wellington Street Journal and elsewhere. Her poems are anthologised by Dunlin Press, PaperSwans, and Fairacre Press.
Lost River
rivers that are rivers are driven not to be rivers
Vahni Capildeo
Look to the trees, their trunks still leaning towards
the silted ditch, branches stretched across its sunken path.
The grass, greener along the verges, darker in
the channel’s centre as if its roots still rest
in water far below the river’s course.
These willows remember its first tumbling, rapid pace
and then its slow meander, the way its passing
smoothed pale sand to the banks, pebbles
beached into pockets, mud firmed to ground.
But look, still, from high above –
you will see its path in the play of light
glancing off the shades of leaves.
Look, as the trees, the birds, the sun
still cast their bright gaze on its dry path.
Rosemary Appleton
L