One Sentence Poems

Ray Templeton Positively Cowslips I read that in one of the Central Asian languages, they use the names of wild flowers to express abstract emotions, but although I walk the fields for hours I’ve never found the one for when I look across the room at what is no longer there. Ray Templeton might have […]

Ray Templeton The Wait He wakes in the night, the bed half-cold, and moves to shift the bare facts, coughs to unmake the space in the room, stretches to fill the house, still sharp, still broken when outside, the sun lifts into the branches. Ray Templeton writes poetry, prose and songs and sometimes the same […]

Ray Templeton So Near In almost a blizzard I break into almost a run, skittering on the almost frozen pavement, and when I’m almost there, I see the skin of powdery white that almost coats the window glass, with a finger trace of letters, that I can almost read. Ray Templeton has been writing poetry […]

Ray Templeton Cut-outs With paper and scissors I formed the shape of a human being, but it wouldn’t tell me what I needed to do, and when it finally did speak, it told only of long nights without a moon, of rivers with no reflections and plants that grew to bud but never flowered. Ray […]

Ray Templeton The Truth We don’t go because he hates the clowns, I heard my mother say, missing the point completely, for the truth was I knew it was the clowns who hated me. Ray Templeton is a writer and musician who was born and grew up in Scotland, stayed briefly in Wales, then moved to […]

Ray Templeton Schuillin Ye’ll haetae scrieve in Ingles, quo the dominie, gin ye wiss tae fang the wicht o’ the eild, fir there’s nae wird i’ th’Erse fir Zeitgeist. Education You’ll have to write in English, said my teacher, if you want to capture the spirit of the age, because there’s no word in Scots […]

Ray Templeton A Short Rain shakes out of the wind whipping grit and grass, slicing trees in slow-motion monochrome that cuts to a long shot overhead of the dog running, raking snow-patches on the path curling out of sight on the hill, as shouts sound off to one side, fading. From a Siege Journal The […]