David Olsen

Kidlington, UK

 

David Olsen's third full-length collection, After Hopper & Lange, is due from Oversteps Books in 2021. Unfolding Origami (2015) won the Cinnamon Press Poetry Collection Award, and Past Imperfect (2019) is also from Cinnamon Press. Four poetry chapbooks are from US publishers.

 

"Lanzarote, 2020", based on a photograph, was completed on 9th November 2020.

 

Lanzarote, 2020

Canary Islands

 

The horizon’s blade

cleaves two blues:

a pale sky with stratus clouds

and seawater undisturbed

by ripples swishing flat sand.

 

On the ochre strand

are chaises longues

in nesting echelons of ten,

each with a bright white frame

and royal blue mattress –

colours of Santorini’s villas.

 

The subtle force of absence

animates the scene;

this year, visitors stay home,

fearful in cloth or paper masks.

Instead of bathing in the Atlantic,

they wash hands for 20 seconds

in the kitchen sink and cook

meals of mundane sameness,

buy toilet tissue and pasta,

curse a wasted summer,

dread a winter unrelieved.