Ice-Fishing

By: Ronald J. Hansford

 

Around my fishing-hole

a necklace of speared salmon

mouthing their soft prayer.

 

I worship on numbed knees

Greenland winds sting my back

fish rise to an ivory lure.

 

A wafer of fresh ice

cataract in my hunter’s eye

is closing the open water.

 

I skim with a horn scoop

intone plainsong to the teeming sea;

words writhe on my three-tined leister.

 

 

Hansford, R. J. (2006) in K. Green (Ed.) Routemasters and Mushrooms: An Earlyworks Press Poetry Anthology.  Hastings, Earlyworks Press.

A Poet Profile of Ron Hansford by Sylvia Oldroyd appears in South 25: A Poetry Magazine from the Southern Counties, April 2002.  Totton: Hobbs the Printers Ltd.  ISSN 0959-1133.

Ron Hansford's First Collection is Beatitudes of the Buttered Brick, Tears in the Fence, 1995.