Poems
Stubborn Fire
My town—my home, as I think of it, is cut glass. It reveals its inner beauty the longer you look: light strikes, slipping through facets, through streets salt-lit, through dusty twittens, awakening what lives within. Urban cliffs crumble—greed lords of the De La Warr manor, who do not care. Crumpled streets, a diet of worms, soldiers and strangers, archived voids and worn-down placards, fading embers of decay. They draw a veil over the town's stubborn fire: The Seven Sisters, beyond a Norman-encroached bay. Green rivers flow from the Weald forest behind, iron wells and powdermills. It perches on the edge of a green-grey-blue expanse, a living thing, laughing, taunting, caressing the town, casting silver moonlight, golden sunlight into its darkest corners. People have lived here—on this land, across long silences and howling pain, forged and beaten ten thousand years, still standing to this day. They love this place. I call it home. Here I stand; I can do no other. The moon, the sun, the sea, yours, mine, ours.
Martin Fisher has worked across Africa and Europe and now lives in the UK, where he gardens for a living. His poems have appeared in Antae, JMWW, Ink Sweat & Tears, and other journals.