Fiona Ritchie Walker
That first summer in the cabin,
my flat belly, you too new
to be fluttering like the wings
in the eaves above us, ready to swirl
en masse across the moonlit sky,
this next generation,
Pipistrelle bats learning to fly.
Night after night I sat, reading, pretending
I wasn’t watching the clock,
wasn’t listening for the last one home.
Fiona Ritchie Walker is a Scottish writer, now based in Bournville, Birmingham. Her poetry and short fiction has been published widely in collections and anthologies, most recently in Amsterdam Quarterly, Postbox Magazine and Magma’s Islands issue.
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