Esther Chilton

If you’d like to be included in this slot, please get in touch: estherchilton@gmail.com. Poems can be up to 60 lines and prose 2000 words. If you’d like to add a short bio and photo, then great. All I ask is that there’s nothing offensive.

My guest for this week is Eric Clarke, who I first met at The London Book Fair ten years ago. It feels like only yesterday! I’ve followed his blog and read lots of his wonderful poetry ever since. I hope you enjoy his latest work:

As Snow Fell

We didn’t see the view going west
up over the ridge from Amesbury
we knew Stonehenge was there
dusk had quickened as snow fell
our eyes peered, the red of tail lights
a Land Rover’s shape formed ahead

the yellow of our headlights searched
its wheel tracks, the space between 
turbulent, thrown up slush, a myriad darts
of white assailed our windscreen, its wipers
swept hypnotic, our eyes blinked in sync
our focus to keep dim red lights viewed

how long we followed lost to memory
distance, all of seven, maybe eight miles
till snow gave way to sleet, till we lost sight 
of red, tarmac stretched as open Plain narrowed
fell away to Winterbourne Stoke, the A303 holds
its secrets, it held us safe that evening

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Author bio:

Eric was raised in Devon near its Somerset and Dorset borders close to the World Heritage Jurassic Coast. He has spent his adult life near the river Thames in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire working as a scientist at the boundary of the physical and life sciences. Now in his later years he finds himself writing poetry and prose, using words in place of molecules to explore life's boundaries. 

His poems and flash fiction appear under the names Eric Daniel Clarke and E D Clarke in publications of the Marlow Writers' Society, and more widely in anthologies, magazines and online journals. His debut book 'Three to Eight' - a take on short poetry is a collection of poems made up of three to eight lines, written between the title's hours. The poems reflect on life, human relationships, chances taken, and those missed.