arts

Poem Of The Week: Hilltop By Ruth Sharman

Hilltop

You see it sometimes:
the way the light strikes
a distant hill, singling out
the space between trees

like a sudden bolt
of memory, or an answer
coming through
from the other side.

A benign shock of emergent energy, Ruth Sharman's fine, profoundly distilled poem encourages a sense of the falling away of scales, of belated recognition.

Beautifully realised in the span of two brief quatrains, further lyrical elaboration would be superfluous to the moment, here rendered in the visitation of bolts of light, nearly spectral in their specificity and disposition.

Fulsome in visual resonance, the sudden illumination galvanises memory as it draws forth the illusion of an epiphany.

'Hilltop' is taken from Scarlet Tiger, published by Templar Poetry (2016), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

More information here.

Also by Steve Whitaker...

Poem Of The Week: Pretending Not To Sleep By Ian Hamilton (1938-2001)

Poem Of The Week: Trust Me By Mary Ruefle

Citizens Of Nowhere: Journeys Of Hope - The Letters Of Meyer And Sonia By Alison Marshall

Poem Of The Week: The Pheasant By Ali Lewis

Poem Of The Week: Dicks By Eoghan Walls

The shortened address for this article is: newspub.uk/020rs

	Sunrise	5:10AM
Sunset	6:59PM