After the Event by Diane Jackman

before 

dusk gathered like a cloak

around me in the quiet garden

trees became skeletons

stretching charcoal fingers

into the fading sky

soon, they were indistinguishable

from black night

now 

since

there are only explosions of red

flaming and violent.

crepuscular has become magenta

burning the retina

noon is a cataclysm 

of cochineal and cinnabar

vermilion and oxblood

no day no night

but every hour

dropping  dropping

gouts of scarlet

Diane Jackman’s poetry has appeared in The Rialto, snakeskin, optimum, Elbow Room, Spillway, Night Garden Journal, small press magazines and anthologies, and won several competitions.  Her childhood was spent on a farm in the English Midlands where the fields were enclosed by the ruined stone walls of a burnt-out seventeenth-century Dower House.  It has had an effect on her work.