Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Colouring the season, poems by Sven Kretzschmar.
Colouring the season
after Helen Fares
Fewer leaves are falling now, mud-brown ground marries
slippage of boots and chill, loamy wetness. Another kind
of love triangle. No goldenrod colouring the season, faint
rays slip through a shredded net of winter branches
and brake. What remains for us in those cold days is light,
an ingle, your warm breath, and the woods. The stillness
and harmony that to us is night.
Sings of bravery
Evening cradled the earth and night
already crept over the hillsides.
Tractors were blocking village centre,
link road, and squares, but her voice
was discernible from underneath all
the noise, the stink, protest, and uproar.
Ukrainian, she confirmed, but gave me her best
German. For as long as she’d be around,
she said. An effort my compatriots
would not value, I thought, and watched her
push her pram across the road, through the rampage
of farm machines. Pushing through for her child.
For as long as she’d be here.
Wintered beauty
after Michael Longley
Frozen gold on the ground. Before layers of ice melt,
these leaves are in glittering, frosted stasis. This is
another day for us in Rosselwood, where moist clouds
get stuck between hills of neighbouring villages.
A storm-torn birch bars our walkway, the enigma
of its root-labyrinth revealed. Lichen lettering
on cracked branches, and we may meet wild boars
or red deer in winter coat. They will flee
into brambles and undergrowth from the large predators
we are in their quick, dark eyes. Did you hear
the black woodpecker call from high up
on a wych elm trunk? Its cry so distinct from the falcon
hovering like forgiveness over the barren crowns above
us. At forest and barley field edge, I used to pick
wildflowers for you, to be forgotten in a jam-jar
of water that, unwittingly, bent and magnified
the evening light. Today, someone must be looking
after the pale of that one-time paddock on the crest
of a hill; its gate long missing. Rosselwood is cold
leaves on cold ground, barren branches peeking out
of fog thickets. On this day, even the shards of the year
can look beautiful.
The rose cloud
A single, cold rose cloud along the evening sky,
the repetition of horrors on our televisions.
Some speak of genocide, some others are silent,
some are dying, some unmask themselves
by denouncing the former as human animals.
Proud behemoths in the same place where
others try to provide at least minimal goodness,
while our elected officials are mostly voicing
mute complicity. Thus comes this year to
an uneven ending: a single, cold rose cloud
along the evening sky.
Sheets above the land
Nights are bitter and beautiful, ground-cover
plants in silent front yards brittle, but held
by tight ice. Even this early in the year
it may happen: wide, dead-cold silence
caresses winter walkways hemmed
with family homes and driveway stiches.
January’s sheets above the land. And underneath
young life, buried devotion, and foreboding
dreams of tomorrow’s tenderness
flaring into fog’s opaque light.
© Sven Kretzschmar
Sven Kretzschmar hails from Germany. His poetry has been published widely in Europe and overseas, among other outlets in Writing Home. The ‘New Irish’ Poets (Dedalus Press, 2019), Hold Open the Door (UCD Press, 2020), Voices 2021 (Cold River Press, 2021) The Irish Times, The Storms, and Das Gedicht. He was awarded 2nd place at the Francis Ledwidge International Poetry Award 2022.