Poem on Sunday: (1) missed call 19:35

Imogen Davies

(1) missed call 19:35

you far flung farmhouse
forked telephone wire
slithering in the grass
under wind’s touch
screaming distance
no one’s picking up
doors shut
lock’s rust
keyhole catches
light struck
a beam of floating dust
into – the hollow of a tree
i see sound
the wood rings
and rings and rings
cracking out the bark
i hear dark
the crunch of faded paint to flakes
like leaves as seasons circulate
cradled on the cusp
a leaf crisps an ice crust
and you –
weathered stone
deaf to dragging echoes
unhooked home
may survive in flesh and in bone
but dissolve
in mist
mist
missed –

Imogen Davies is a 24-year-old Welsh writer and creative from Aberystwyth. With a bilingual upbringing in Welsh and English, she went on to study an undergraduate degree in French, Spanish, and Catalan at Durham University while currently undertaking a Masters in Modernist Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her first self-published collection, DISTANCES (2024), explores modern relationships, the natural world and her Welsh identity, as discussed on BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Cymru. Named as one of sixty New Welsh Poets by Poetry Wales, her work has appeared both online and in print in various literary magazines, such as New Welsh Review and Acumen Young Poets, among others. Find out more about Imogen here.