Twilight and Mary Oliver words

Twilight 
by Aileen Paterson

The terns hover over the estuary at dusk, plummeting into the water. Turnstones fly in a flurry of white wings before settling into the shallows. Twilight is the magical time when all the people disperse and the tide recedes to leave a shoreline for me to wander on. Trees become silhouettes against an amber sky. The beach is abandoned except for the birds. My feet make soft footprints in the sand. The water has woken from its sleep and glimmers with hope. I walk home and hear the owls calling and a dark shape swooping high in the air over the fields. Dusk clings to my skin and infuses me with magic, the sunset caught beneath my skin.

Photo by Aileen Paterson

Using Words from Mary Oliver
by Kay Ritchie

Times turned strange.

Days seemed weeks.

Weeks seemed hours &

after months locked down,

when only watching seasons

saved our sanity,

autumn comes &

wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

(where planes once sliced through cloud, streaked skies with crystalled contrails),

are heading home again.

A plump of v’s.

Black on blue.

Their honks & hoots,

like those we made each Thursday,

surely signal hope.


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influenced by Mary Oliver’s "The chance to love everything"
by Kay Ritchie


this may be the first story

shared amongst us all

this plague-time-telling

whose dark heart

left an ancient ache &

there are many reasons for its passing

down to children

and to children’s children

and their children’s children’s children

for the world stood still for once &

took a look

at what was going wrong &

people learned to take more care

to be aware of others

of themselves &

of the planet

so let’s not be the first to

forget