Wild Court

An international poetry journal based in the English Department of King’s College London

‘Ancestors’ – a poem by Alan Buckley

    Photo by Eva Wilcock on Unsplash 

 
 
 

    Ancestors

 

Their voices – those we barely
remember, those we never

knew – urge us to bear witness.
A corpse on barbed wire. Nights filled

with flames. One hand slipping from
another’s grasp. They’ve suffered

beyond our knowing. But then
they ask us to turn, and walk

towards the spring of our lives.
Out in the woods their voices

merge with the trill and chatter –
nuthatch, mistle-thrush, blackbird.

 
 

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Author:

Alan Buckley

Alan Buckley is the author of two pamphlets, ‘Shiver’ and ‘The Long Haul’, and his first collection ‘Touched’ (HappenStance Press) was published in 2020. He was previously on the editorial board of Ignition Press, and for many years was a school writer-in-residence for First Story. He works as a psychotherapist for a refugee charity in Oxford.

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