I am delighted to feature the poem Winter Sun Speaks by Maggie Reed. We first met on a residential workshop several years ago. The picture of winter sun is also by Maggie.

Winter Sun Speaks

I birth my cry through cloud layers
push my weight low over the southern horizon,
strident, desperate, slanting over the hills
forking through trees, splintering ice.
I blind drivers on the school run.

How I ache for summer skies, to leap and arch
over the earth, spread light, energy and love.

But for now my shriek, my low level beam, insists
my right for the few hours I’m allowed
to crisp up these dark winter days.

Biography:

Maggie Reed lives in the Malvern Hills, Worcestershire, having spent much of her life in Cumbria. Her current collection Let Small Wings Fly was self-published in 2021 to accompany the Arts Council funded travelling art exhibition ‘Mappa Marches’ that visited libraries and art centres across Herefordshire throughout 2022.

She has been published in several journals, including The North, Orbis, Poetry Birmingham, Pennine Platform, Three Drops from a Cauldron and Poetry Village, and has been included in anthologies such as This Place I Know (Handstand Press, 2018), Places of Poetry (One World, 2019), When All This is Over (Calder Valley Poetry, 2020), Poetry of Worcestershire (Offas Press, 2019) and In the Sticks (Offas Press, 2021). She won the Poem and a Pint competition (judge, Carrie Etter) in 2019.