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title
Issue # 3 January 2011
"... brevity is the soul of wit ..."
- William Shakespeare

Bio


Mandy Pannett teaches creative writing and is the author of three poetry collections - 'Bee Purple' and 'Frost Hollow' (Oversteps Books) and 'Allotments in the Orbital' (Searle Publishing) Her novella 'The Onion Stone' is being published later this year by Pewter Rose Press.


Mandy Pannett


 

Smudges of Life

Sky like grit on skins of potatoes; late-
strong wind. A heifer is grazing a backlit
meadow as Chagall's young bride floats
over the fields. With a finger-tip touch
she brings him a herring, a fiddle, blue
cows and a goat. These were the smudges
of life. His angel, of course, was there
from the start: maybe that moment when
half-stillborn he was shocked into breath
in a bucket of ice - in his head, he said,
an angel was there in his head. Later
the blazings of scarlet and blue: radiant
uprise of shimmering praise, a window
transfigured by light. Afterwards: rubble;
a broken menorah, sorrow of white in his
desolate city, falling of bones in the snow.