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Shadows

So many shadows
Have come
Into this house.
Under every dining chair
Lies an architecture,
A fretwork, of dusk.
The edge of the phone
Where it lies
Is dissolved into dimness.
The cup in my hand
Holds an obscurity
Turning on the glaze.
Under my fingers
Others flex and travel
In motions of shade.
On every surface
A second one rests
Rejecting the light.
Shadow-lines cross
Running over the floor
To mass in the corner.
The flowers stand
In their vase
Showing petals of grey.
And your features
I see express
The clinging of night.
I did not know
We could be lost
In this ordinary dark.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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