Alison Hramiak is a part time poet and part time teacher educator living and working in Yorkshire. She has written poems from an early age and has been published in several Forward Poetry anthologies and also on various web sites funded by the Arts Council. She writes for occasions at www.poetryforlives.co.uk and regularly blogs about poetry there. She reviews educational and historical writing, and also poetry anthologies, and has recently started performing at open mic sessions including at the Huddersfield Literature Festival earlier this year.

Broken lies

Too well I slaked my thirst
on truth untold.
(Alas). Too well.
A bitter potion, (of) salt and fire and acid,
that staked, then raked my heart,
like dry leaves in wet grass.

Reverberating.
Ricocheting.
Pinball in a machine without lights
to guide it from the then, to the now and beyond.
That truth untold,
has told on me.
And quenched,
I cannot now be unquenched.

And if our past defines us,
what now for me - 
with past undone?
Crumbling, tumbling, crashing around me.
(Deep dark). Muddied waters of uncertainty,
uprooting family trees,
diluting blood lines,
dragging me to my knees.
Taunting, taunted.
Haunting, haunted.
The mocking mockery of genes that bore me this far.

Truth untold, which 
Separates.
Isolates.
Desolates.
And knowing, now, 
I cannot now unknow,
this knowledge that 
Implodes and implores me.
Uneven and unhinged.
Undone.

Competing Religion:From the window of a train

All across the flat lands, 
the scattered stoic stone spires of English churches,
reach towards the sky,
in tribute to their god.
Crying to be heard,
a testament to the toil of their beliefs.

And in the fields of gold,
the withered wooden limbs of lightening trees,
reach towards it too,
in honour of their gods.
Dying to be seen,
a testament to the toil of the believed.

And all the while, the black backed crows
sit silently, stretched along the wires,
straining to see whose god will answer first.

Berries in the snow

Hidden in barren boughs
iced berries, like frosted rubies,
await the raw sunshine warmth of the day.
They spatter the monochromatic blandscape 
of a winter in post viral modernity,
dancing and laughing in the breeze.
The gathering sun articulates their inevitable doom
as it arcs across a pale cerulean sky,
cut glass crystal crowns trembling in sweet anticipation.
Ah, but they go out in a blaze of scarlet glory
long leaving remnants on our jaded retinas,
a bright red smile to get us through to spring.
Crimson silent expectation of hope.