Poems from the 12-Hour Sonnet Contest: Anthro, James McConachie

James McConachie has been published by Iambapoet, Eat the Storms, Black Bough, the Dark Mountain project and Pilgrim House Magazine. His debut collection will be published by Black Bough, late 2024.

Anthro

 We invented fairies, for some reason,

spritely scampered hand-friends, puckish, princely

imps, homunculi, winged tiny heathens.

And I wonder why and whether, simply

 

the familiar comforts of a face

are what we need, to feel assured, at home

with all our rights, as the ascendant race

and brute dominion as a founding tome.

 

While all around the air, the limbs of trees

are dense with weightless lives of dazzling song,

from a kaleidoscopic panoply

of miracles. I fear we have it wrong

 

to centre wonder, as a part of us.

Since seed set fat, we have been ever thus.


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