New Poetry by Chris Hopkins

Ancestors

Runestone’s colour has gone. 
Though the wild flowers are still in it’s mouth.
The dead still boast of themselves off the worked plane.

Translation, typed
on the small white card, tilted at it’s foot.
Corners as sharp as the cutting tool.

A dead thousand years pass for the stone
without its master
while the pinned winged bugs lament their century’s end.
An ex’s photograph in the land fill
my closest claim to being found in history
when all the zeros and ones of my foot prints 
are on the moon.

A silent cabaret of faces in a focus switch
through the viewing glass
to the ancient stone.

Wire songbirds wait for me
in the next cabinet along.


- Chris Hopkins 2018

Christopher Hopkins grew up in Neath, South Wales during the 1970’s surrounded by a landscape of machines and mountains.  Christopher currently resides in the Canterbury area with his wife and baby daughter. His debut chapbook ‘Take Your Journeys Home’ (Clare Songbirds Publishing House) has been nominated for the IPPY book award for poetry. He has also received two Pushcart Prize nominations for his poems ‘Sorrow on the Hill’ and ‘Smoke and Whiskey’. His second chapbook ‘The Last Time We Saw Strangers’ is due out in Spring 2018. His work has been published in multiple publications including The Morning Star,  Backlash Press and The Paragon Journal.