Guest Poem by Isabel Miles

Born and raised in a Scottish mining village, Isabel Miles spent thirty years as a scientist then turned writer. Her poems and short stories have been published in Green Ink Poetry, Northwards Now, Snakeskin, The Road Not Taken, Dreich and Acumen, among others. She is the author of a poetry pamphlet, Spent Earth (Mudfog Press). Her poems have featured in two anthologies and she has published one novel, Chosen, on Kindle. She lives in the North York Moors. This poem is from Acumen 108.

Night Vision

At noon the garden’s open as a flower,
its beauty fitting to our spectrum and our scale.
Green lawn, brown earth
and flashing red, black, white,
three partridges that sprint across the grass.
Plain everyday.

The midnight garden’s a dark pool.
Upon it strands of brightness float.
Tonight the moon has picked some flowers
from the blossoming plum tree.

All else is shadow, liquid,
darkly bright,
more full of wonder than a solstice dawn.

A whispering of wings, a snuffling on the lawn.
Hedgehog and owl are hunting
prey invisible to us.
For them this night is commonplace
and day’s too dazzling strange to linger in.