Poem Of The Week: Hilltop By Ruth Sharman

Hilltop

You see it sometimes:
the way the light strikes
a distant hill, singling out
the space between trees

like a sudden bolt
of memory, or an answer
coming through
from the other side.

A benign shock of emergent energy, Ruth Sharman's fine, profoundly distilled poem encourages a sense of the falling away of scales, of belated recognition.

Beautifully realised in the span of two brief quatrains, further lyrical elaboration would be superfluous to the moment, here rendered in the visitation of bolts of light, nearly spectral in their specificity and disposition.

Fulsome in visual resonance, the sudden illumination galvanises memory as it draws forth the illusion of an epiphany.

'Hilltop' is taken from Scarlet Tiger, published by Templar Poetry (2016), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author.

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