Eerie Loveliness by Frances Daggar Roberts

Poplars and hawthorns lining the road through Berridale

are sinister as witch fingers in late afternoon light

though the air itself seems full of shimmering gold.

Where the country opens wide again beyond the town

the poplars’ wintery spikes are stencilled

on the dun coloured fields and the great mounds

of the glacial moraine.

Every so often

the verge of the road is curiously exposed

for twenty metres or more

before needles of desolate winter grass resume.

The emptiness has a harsh beauty

and we travel in silence, you and I.

We should be mellow in this golden afternoon

but instead a wordless sorrow keeps us company.

Frances Daggar Roberts’s poems have been published in Verity La, Eureka Street, Other Terrain, and other journals. Frances’s work has been included in two Australian anthologies- A Patch of Sun, and The Intimacy of Strangers. She is a member of Sydney’s North Shore Poetry Project. Frances works as a psychologist.