Sharon Phillips started learning to write poems a few years ago after she retired from her career in education. Her poems have been published online and in print, and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (2017), the Indigo Firsts pamphlet competition (2018) and the WoLF Poetry Competition (2019). Sharon won the Borderlines Poetry Competition in 2017 and was among the winners of the Poetry Society Members’ Competition in November 2018. She lives on the Isle of Portland, in Dorset.
Traces
Overhead white contrails
and in the bay a trawler,
its wake crosshatched
by herring gulls.
Near a path heaved
out of true by landslips,
a pale grey ammonite
among pink kiss-me-quick.
At the high-water mark,
orange netting, tangled
with blue nylon rope.
On a slab of hard slat
ripples etched in the mud
of a salt lake.
Signifying Spring
at noon a skein of geese skims
past two kestrels wheel above
the bay you see chiffchaffs
and wheatears skitter on the rocks
gone five you get the washing
down from the line to the west
a grey flurry of seagulls spirals
as the sky bleaches to lemon
and a gleam of song comes
from your rooftop a blackbird
perched on the aerial’s tip
broadcasting
By chance
After work, you stop at the harbour
and see a school of mullet
swim above the mud and weed,
whisk beneath a raft of litter
glimmer out again
spotlit by the evening sunlight,
each slim grey fish equidistant
from its neighbours, the flicks
of fin and tail so exact
that you’re dazzled
by the swarm of chances
that encoded each fish
with the instinct
to swim close to the others
but never collide.
Sharon Phillips