Christopher Hopkins is a Welsh poet living in Faversham, Kent. He has received an IPPY, CLMP Firecracker and three Pushcart Prize nominations. He has two chapbooks published by Clare Songbirds, New York and his third The Shape of a Tulip Bird is due out this summer. Christopher is widely published including poems in The Morning Star, The Cortland Review, Rust + Moth and Ink Sweat & Tears.
Listen to the river
Turbulence in this stretch of water
has always called for company.
Either the swerve of lights from the town-land
or a restful stop of a knot.
They all come to the gloss,
the glasswork of the flooding mouth,
the flicker of the crushed can moon.
They come to hear the absence singing,
a reposeful song that rhymes
I love you
– or when wind comes twisting in Autumn,
the ripple movements from the beginning of rain –
My name is heaven.
How do we love
travelling out, on the pulse of a life’s perfect circle,
out on the dragging swell from a pin drop tear,
the confluence
of the swallowed and the un-drinkable,
a rush of brackish water from the setting
of the name-less stone.
The day-swimmer is blessed with the numbing of questions
by a coldness of the waters. And the night-swimmer,
an eating mirror.
Maybe the body floats
with the sully of tears,
and the echo sinks
with the weight of conviction.
The light has no master, here,
now the shallows look deeper than its loneliness.
A simple trick of the night.
I know how long the water waits
while the tide is turning.
I’ve set my watch to it.
Christopher Hopkins
