CHRISTOPHER HOPKINS - POEMS

Christopher Hopkins grew up on a council estate in Neath, South Wales during the 1970’s. This fractured landscape of machines and mountains, with the underlying ‘Hiraeth’ in welsh life has developed into a distinctive voice and soul in his poetry.  He currently resides in Canterbury and works for NHS cancer services.
His debut chapbook ‘Take Your Journeys Home’ is due for release with Clare Songbirds Publishing House later this year.
Christopher has had and due to have poems published in Backlash Press, Ibis Head Review, The Journal (formally the Contemporary Anglo – Scandinavian poetry), Rust & Moth, Harbinger Asylum, The Blue Nib Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, VerseWrights, Tuck Magazine, Dissident Voice magazine, Poetry Superhighway,  Duane's PoeTree, Outlaw Poetry. Christopher’s spoken word poetry has also featured in a podcast of Golden Walkmen Magazine. 

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​THE ANXIETY OF STARLINGS

​There is the wonder,
in the anxiety of the starlings,
oiled,
starved.
How beauty
can fall out of something,
how their shiver made a whale.
 
A sky dance 
of a fattening shadow,
round and full,
stretching and curved.
They are the pitch and duration,
to a stave,
of supersonic candy floss,
sitting on the coral birth.
 
Like a fluxing crown
above the lines of slates, 
the black church dagger,
and the empty carpark mile,
all still to roll over, into life,
a drowning chorus 
of a hundred thousand frightened mouths.
In the sky’s reflection,
we the our ghosts
in their solid state.
 
 

​THE BARLEY FIELD 

​ 
Unmoored from the day.
Still to be lost in ambitious dreaming,
to pay the ransom to my sleep.
 
In the field of passing I found myself,
where ten thousand tillers danced
to the whistling song of a mockingbird,
 
rhyming scorn on a day thats done.
Then the breeze grew in heart,
and the noise that came
 
like the sudden purr of rain,
from flow and tussle
of the ears and leaf,
 
where the silver rivers ran.
On towards the milk white stone
with all the stars in pocket,
 
the kicked brown dirt under tender foot,
stirring as mosquitos dancing.
Unbound from earth into the well of dreaming.
 
How dull seems the day
to the body at rest,
to a mind freed in dreaming.
 
 

​PRINCE OF HIDE AND SEEK

​An arm of smoke,
rising.
Debrided to the bony white.
Dove tail lost
cast over sky,
and the autumn rainbows
are falling apart.

The wood smoke weave
hides the veins of tobacco,
as flames turn back
to their black hard state.
 
School bell missed again.
In its place,
feats of emprise,
and all the forest animals bow
to the Prince of hide and seek.
 
But all too soon
the light has gone.
Shadow arms
around the shoulders,
as cold seeps up
the pin hollows in the bone.
 
The police man torch
a polar star
to home.
Their Bibles unsmiling by the fire place.
 
For the sake of quiet adventures,
take the hidings waiting.
Run, run away child,
away from the thieves of being.

​FOREST RAM

​Twilight,
is a time you should always spend with your lover.
 
The moments,
when time travel is possible.
 
When the frog belly gold
gunned on the walls of the forest,
pull your recall and complaint into the warmness,
while there is still colour to the silhouettes.
 
Otherwise the eyes of the forest
will have your heart,
and sundown will be your cave.
 
 

​A SUMMER BLESSING

​A cotton hill looking for a home.
Drifting to a blessing,
paper thin.
 
In a breath,
the warmth is feathered out,
as dandelion seeds on a cow’s tongue.
 
And as quick as the sun’s mask came,
the un-clouding of the marble blue,
the rays come again,
and come the only reconciliation we have.
Our un-paused atonement,
through no action
but being.
 
Shoulders fall that inch,
and in that moment
we all have perfect skin.
 
Plum black to the copper brown,
closed idle stare,
in such a passing,
into the light of summer,
we are absolved
from an injurious past.
 
Like the sun,
rinsing its hands
on the newness of a day.