Norman Miller’s pamphlet was shortlisted in the Best Unpublished Pamphlet category for the Disabled Poets Prize 2024.
The winners were announced on 16 March 2024, during Deptford Literature Festival, in an online event.
Norman Miller – from Learning in Nine Keys
© Norman Miller 2024
Winter Love
Four pm dusk sparks sodium to life
in glass cages, as upright folk head home
to watch re-runs of Sex & The City alone.
Our mirrors won’t lie any more, baring
visions no-one’s done pilgrimage for
since passion plays stood in for love –
that thing that must be cast with a familiar,
bewitcher, one who turns at the turn of days
to reach for skin not screen, foregoing
data bits to find connection in the
twilight of a morning room, facing
the old street and watching horizon.
These winter dawns are cold enough for steam
to rise from tea, dews and mingling ghosts
hanging from trees here in our deep south.
We are not rich or beautiful. We have no
followers. Our cool is not absence of heat.
And we love for how far we have come.