Sue Spiers was British Mensa’s SIG Sec for Poetry (2016 – 2021) and her collections are Jiggle Sac and Plague – A Season of Senryu. Her poems have appeared in Acumen, Dream Catcher, The North and South, among others, and online at: www.inksweatandtears.co.uk and www.thelakepoetry.co.uk.
Her work has been included in the Bloodaxe anthology Hallelujah for 50ft Women and in the Paper Swans Press anthologies Best of British and Pocket Poetry: Cricket.
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Ghazal: Fire
Promethean gifts explore the themes we birth in fire
as candles waver, cold days’ sunbeams are crowned with fire.
Flamingo peach flickers in a trick of bright tongues.
They bring a heat to conjure the dreams we see in fire.
A reborn phoenix rises after each time it dies in flames.
Myths and legends become ideals that gleam in lakes of fire.
We plunder earth’s deep veins of long dead fossils, bones
turned black, Vulcan rivers form raven seams to spark up fire.
In worship at the mythical furnaces of blacksmith-Gods;
shield makers forge golden wings of seraphim to rise from fire.
Praise the anvils and hammers – possessions and projectiles,
burn heretical creed against regimes we build with fire.
Immolation any arsonist can brand on victims in scars.
The red flower as a tool of biased memes we cast in fire.
Can rhetoric ever lighten damage to the fevered heart,
quell its demon; the extremes we fear from fire?
Sue Spiers
Sue’s collection Plague – A Season of Senryu can be purchased directly from Sue, DM via Twitter @SpiroPoetry.
