Lorely Forrester was born in Kenya, raised in the Caribbean, graduated from King’s College, London, afterwards working in magazines, advertising and documentaries. She lives in Ireland, where she was Editor/Feature writer of Discover Sligo magazine, wrote PR & marketing material, organised events, designed gardens, including a Gold Medal-winning garden at Bloom and introduced (commercially) a new rose named WB Yeats. Her work has been published in several magazines and reviews.

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Locked Down

When finally they let us move
again, and travel, and commune,
it was too late for you.
I came, tripping over rules,
panicked by unlearned habits,
fumbling through airports,
crowds, timetables and routines
that once were so familiar.
The look you gave me lingers
to this day. For even though,
illicitly, I ditched my mask and
softly spoke your name, and mine,
your eyes still said ‘Who are you?’
And something even worse –
I saw reproach; your mask the
ragged scars of hurt, long
cauterized, a silenced pain
thrust deep inside that said ‘You
never came’. I held your hand
and wept, your dry, frail fingers
safe within my clasp; your grasp
of things so far beyond all reach,
that no words could explain.

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Muse

Wombed in the deep house, I hide when
you call me, slide between tall screens
where you cannot lever me out.

But shuttered inside green light
I hear the bright flute of your voice
and all choice is gone.

You have occupied me, wormed in, insinuated,
cited me my uninvited parasite, and I quiver at
your breath like a young lover unsatisfied.

But will you yearn blood from my stone,
reveal me, quicken the marrow in my bone,
you arch temptress of deluding illusion?

Or will you instead bed me and go,
leave me alone, strung in the divide of
desire and songs that will not be sung?

Come hither, delight me you siren of sleight
hand, grant me my sight. You whom I have fed,
release my hidden vein of untried silver,
tease out my skein of un-dyed silken thread.

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Liturgy of Colour

A mist of blue has filtered through the woods,
spilled over banks and under fallen trees,
breathed into all the quiet spaces that
no one ever sees. It traces voiceless
moments of my life, conjures encrypted
scenes, releases ghosts that float between
the trees, drifting through seas that are not blue,
nor purple; a wash of colour that defies
my need to name it, a colour like a prize, a
colour that is just a lovely hurting in the eyes.

Not spring, or April, not a month or day
focus the swathes of blue that cradle me.
No single childhood pathway paves my
heart with this elusive shade, no diary
instructs me to behave this way, but when
this blue invades me, it is the self-begetter of
its dreams, the reservoir of its own memories.

Wrought from this hue, phantoms unbidden
rise: I see anew dogs breasting waves of fragile
hyacinth; hear happy cries of children; recognise
a wistful adolescent and two couples wrapped
in hesitant new love, all lapped around with blue.
I see life’s segments jigsaw into frame, and all
through drifts of colour that I cannot name.

Time is not marked by calendars or years,
nor can I measure it in dreams and hopes
fulfilled, or vanquished fears. Time is bound up
in colour: a flow of scarlet poppies that shear
me off mid-thought, a waste of winter sky
caught up in snow, the glow of burning
beech leaves flaming through slow seasons,
the piercing, unsought grey of dead birds’
pinions, bringing me to tears; time is a blue-
drenched woodland, peopled with souvenirs.
Time is marked off in colour, a liturgy of colour,
patterns made of colour tell my years.