Luneberg Hawthorn | Colin Honnor

is still in flower, throwing its wind-briared
spikes  to moss-saddle the furred lichens’
of emerald centuries. Eyes that wept
as terror fixed watch this dew-quiver, yet
now they rapture the billion prurience.

To rake a centuries’ hundred  wars
in disarticulations of their febrile
sepia coloured features, protrude
while rights and duties scald
the infirm theories of convected sparks.

Haws and hips bronze autumns
to burned orange, unchange as smoke roils.
Well, let this fall nourish its sandy soils
hide sparse thin threads of feldgrau
beneath its root-clumped black
where if it stood over crouched bloused men
in May time, pens trace blue lakes and shores
in its instrumental shade, surrendering silence

to its silence. How  it constructs a snowfall
to make glaring snow model of those lost reichs
of no season all white bone its whitened
bark music affirms only the truth of thorns
blunts the sharp iniquity of their inquisitions
and renders arbitral forensic adversaries
to snow thaw, save for those thick-leaved testimonies
each mayflowers an accusation, testifies
as it floats, thawed from frost, watches
as it gathers their words to flower briar, frost.

                                             These things
placed in annales whisper through its thorns
where alder and cherry sit in throned
silence that the winds pluck at
where white turns May rose to blackthorn
in the dynasties of trees, where the masked horse’s
eye rods, cones shudder, where forest’s
windows yawn to swallow  its ice-mantles
to display skull, tibia, fibia, rooted in its roots.

Colin Honnor is widely published in magazines in print and online, including: Bitterzoet, The Screech Owl, Eunoia Review, Crack the Spine, Poetry Bay, The Missing Slate, The Hour of Lead, Sentinel Journal, MessageinaBottle, Ataraxia, Miracle, InkSweatandTears, A New Ulster, The New Shetlander, Hark, Angle, Awen, Allegro and Inclement. He formerly edited Poetry and Audience, is a literary scholar, translator of modern European poetry and runs a fine arts press in the Cotswolds.