Music
Editor's Comments
Welcome to Issue 37 of Allegro Poetry Magazine, the Music Edition. This subject proved extremely popular with poets and I received as many submissions as I do for general issues which is a first for a themed issue. This issue includes exciting new voices as well as regular contributors. I hope you enjoy the selection.
Poems
Before the First Sa
Before the first Sa,
the tanpura teaches the room
how to hold its breath.
Nothing is empty.
Silence is only sound
remembering its source.
Sa—a lamp set on the floor.
Re—the hinge of a door opening inward.
Ga—green mango on the tongue,
its sharpness waking forgotten summers.
Ma—rain finding the oldest stone.
Pa—a heron refusing the wind.
Dha—the copper scent before lightning.
Ni—the last star unwilling to disappear.
Then Saa—
not a return,
but the same river
meeting itself from a greater height.
The composer does not arrange notes.
They wait
until each swara begins listening
to the others;
until longing discovers its own echo,
until breath and resonance
can no longer tell
which one gave birth to the other.
When the song arrives,
it wears no signature.
It leaves only eight footprints,
and the silence
walking home alone.
Navratra
The Sound of Her Presence
Every morning begins inside my mother's hands,
where her bangles gather sunlight and teach it how to sing.
Their crystal laughter spills through the house,
and even the waiting walls bloom with sound.
Her anklets are two little rivers of silver,
flowing wherever her kindness walks.
The floor remembers each delicate note,
long after her footsteps have passed.
Her earrings borrow whispers from the wind,
while the tiny gleam upon her nose
holds a patient star
that never forgets to smile.
Then her saree rises with the breeze—
not as cloth, but as a quiet sky unfolding.
Its gentle rustle is the language of rain in bamboo,
the turning of leaves no season dares interrupt.
Whenever it brushes past me,
my restless heart remembers its way home.
But above every ornament lives her voice—
soft enough to calm frightened evenings,
warm enough to persuade winter into spring.
She speaks, and ordinary words become birds,
building nests inside my soul.
I carry the whole day because she is in it:
in the music of the kitchen,
in the fragrance of folded clothes,
in the lamp that waits for dusk,
in every silence that feels lovingly occupied.
The world says love cannot be seen.
Perhaps it cannot.
But every day I hear it—
in the bangles, the anklets, the flowing sari,
and in the voice that keeps calling my name
as though it is the most beautiful prayer
God ever places upon her lips.
Navratra
Downland
The
winter sun casts unexpected shadows,
catching
shallow scoops and folds
we
wouldn’t have known were there.
We enter
a sunken path:
the
endless hum of tyres on tarmac’s gone,
absorbed
by depth and darker, colder air.
We’re
stopped, and can’t go on, quite suddenly
by a
robin singing of only itself
in
sunlight at the top of a tangled tree.
Phil Vernon
Brown Women Don’t Diet
Eunice Kathleen Waymon drew
me
out of my mother that year Her voice
issued instructions: how much sweet
was needed to get by in self-selected exile
She knew something about where I was
headed She had already overcome
re-arranged what some claimed to own
Her starling her jazz
her blue notes
her folk wanting a little more sermon
some gospel they could live by Rewind
Nina Simone took on the devil’s music
to warn me about scarcity gave me a
bowl to cradle my daughters Three
have sat with me we sip tea I insist on
sweetness a little more not
enough
I have White friends now whittling
their waists wanting less each time
I press repeat and repeat and
repeat the lesson knowing what the lady knew
better That day will come unsought
The body’s margins will cinch
when they leave me carrying in each full hand
the cane I carted in two suitcases & a full heart
Storehouses to shore up what the world
will tell them could not be real
Too rich they’ll be told to be good for you
They will boil water for their thirsty crop
spill sugar wasteful like their mother & cue music
Ru Freeman
Ultrasound Sonata
The eye becomes a quiet operating
room
where light must learn to pass through density,
and sound replaces sight with engineered bloom:
a vibration mapped in surgical geometry.
The probe begins its almost
invisible hymn,
a tone finer than attention can retain,
turning what is clouded, slow, and dim
into drifting particulate of pale refracted grain.
No violin was built for this
design,
this microscopic weather made of care,
a frequency that strips the known from line
and leaves perception reassembled in air.
The surgeon listens not with ear
but hand:
conducting light through what we understand.
David Anson Lee
Sheet
Music
The sound of the sheet
you
pulled over us
was like
the sound of the rain
on our
bedroom window,
encasing
a slippery love.
JK Miller
Evensong
Evensong
in these parts is still observed
by
dunnock, robin, and blackbird
who
perch and sing to celebrate
their
day, now done, with evensong.
Charles Barker-Benfield
Encore: the silent season
The
trees are singing
their
last autumn song.
One
final song – encore,
Encore,
encore.
Before
their singing
becomes
inaudible.
Leafless
– they are silent
for a
season –
encore.
Sara Stegen
Organ
Practice, St Albans Cathedral
Demi
semi quavers set up in lines
above
chords in fathoms
peer
with the sun through clerestory windows
above
saints lined up on screens,
Bach
tumbling through space above
Christ
crucified.
Alban’s
relic is surrounded
by
rising lines of notes
sounded
out through the nave’s amplifier
with
trumpet blasts of tone,
shifting
minor chords to major
and back
again.
The
thunder grumble of pedals
blown up
through space
with
vibrations of melody
ripple
in ascending lines
to
descend thudding to rest.
Medieval
Christ hangs,
St
Christopher impaled in plaster
trembles
to the shudder of sound
piped
into the altar’s vortex,
notes
penetrate shadows,
leave no
person unturned,
flesh
shapes life in tune with the vacuum of time.
Neil Beardmore
Shackleton’s
Violin
Shackleton
paces the floorboards of his Edinburgh home,
back and
forth, feeling the list of the ship in his bones.
Outside
his window, rolling clouds, spats of rain on the glass,
Elephant
island is a grey mass above the clock tower.
Still,
he paces, he wants to unsteady himself from the solid floor,
when he
bites his tongue, he tastes sea salt.
The
weight of boredom is crushing him, his brain freezing over,
he wants
to call his men.
Come!
Come!
All will
be well!
But what
if he is the soul that needs rescuing?
From the
taunt rigging of his nerves?
A
crystal decanter slides across a mahogany table,
plummets
to the depths, he picks up a sliver of ice.
All will
be well!
After
his death the house is slowly broken apart,
swallowed
by the encroaching city.
Mirrors,
doors, cutlery, all are lost,
but from
the floorboards rises this, a violin.
Someone
is playing.
Nimrod,
Endurance, Morning, Quest.
An ice
slope, crevasse, storm, a shrieking gale,
Someone
is playing snow, the colour blue.
Someone
is playing a rough sea,
far off,
on the other side, Shackleton listens.
Come!
Come!
All will
be well!
Louise
Warren
Harmony
Harmony
is the domain of poets.
- Aldo Leopold
To see
is to hear
multiple
notes at once,
to bring
discord to order,
to make
dissonance
into
harmony.
I see so
much.
I hear
so much.
Am I up
to the task,
this
calling to make music,
to
harmonize?
True
music has never been
simply
one-dimensional.
Voices
clamor
for
attention
at the
expense of others.
What can
the poet do
but
listen, no matter
how
painful, record
even the
inane.
Even
ruptured sound
has
potential. Every tone
must be
heard, each note
accounted
for, composed
with a
melody of hope.
Then
sing it like a friend!
Ken
Hada
The
Piano Lesson
The
house smells of boiled cabbage
and a dog sits by the piano
barking as evenly as a metronome.
The girl with her hands on the keyboard
has no innate sense of rhythm
and is too scared of dogs to relax.
In school uniform navy, she struggles
over études and variations
but for all her effort she never improves
for the endless exams and competitions
imposed by parents who practice being proud
in front of the mirror.
She
envies the girl in the long flowing skirts
who attends the next class
and plays nothing but Chopin mazurkas.
Juliet
Wilson
Crescendo
I perch
seat-edge, as a teenager plays
his
clarinet at his Grade VIII exam recording.
Melodies
and rhythms intertwine, dance
through
the summer windows and out to
the car
park and the grass and fields beyond.
This is
where it was all going: a young boy
who
couldn’t get a note out of his clarinet
for
weeks, who carried it all day at school
and
often forgot to go to his lesson,
the
teachers’ faith that remained undiminished.
In the
room, the air stands still and listens.
Sniffs,
coughs and shuffles are gagged
in
noses, throats and bodies. When the last note
sounds,
a deep breath resonates from chairs,
clapping
erupts on staccato hands.
Maggie Davison
What the Water Keeps
Before
rain is rain, it gathers
the
silence of clouds,
then
loosens into notes too small
for the
sky to remember.
On cedar
needles it is a careful hand.
On old
tin roofs, an eager child
counting
without numbers.
It
lingers in moss,
teaching
stones the slow language of green,
threads
itself through fern roots,
finds
the dark patience of earth,
then
slips into a brook
where
pebbles round each syllable
until
the water forgets
where
falling ended and flowing began.
The
river carries every voice—
leaf,
heron, hillside, forgotten bridge—
without
keeping any for itself.
At the
cliff's edge
it opens
its whole throat,
and the
valley, listening,
becomes
larger than its echo.
Beyond
the estuary
the sea
asks for no names.
Still,
when the tide lifts
and
clouds begin again,
somewhere
inside each drop
the
first quiet note remains.
Navratra
Music
A tune
arrived barefoot,
as if
the evening had forgotten
to close
its window.
The dust
on the shelf
lifted
its face first;
then the
silence smiled.
A cup of
tea
kept
growing warmer
without
another sip.
Some
notes
sat on
the clothesline,
drying
beside yesterday's rain.
The moon
folded itself
into the
pocket of a child
humming
to no one.
I
searched for the song,
but it
had already hidden
inside
my own heartbeat—
where
every pause
knows
the road home.
Navratra
Swallows
Each one
a conductor’s hand
feeling
music with the tips of fingers,
drawing
out a prelude or closing
a coda
with an angled flick.
Experts
on sky, its pressures and currents,
they
hang upon winds, knowing them
as well
as they know their own feathers.
They
collect pale down from barn owl,
or goose
to line their mud nests,
sometimes
letting them fall through the air
for
their mate to catch, increasing
the
tempo at a swerve. They swoop low
into
adagio or angle a wing into vivace;
then
alight on the wires, waiting to be sounded.
Rebecca
Gethin
Double bass
In a
room full of surrealist art
the
double bass looked at home
as if he
had climbed out of a picture
in the
exhibition to lie down for a rest
on the
four poster bed when the music ended.
He was
poised on one pointed toe
and
twirled his wide hips, light catching
the
sheen on his belly, a hollowed calyx.
His body
a lung and voice box. Surely
the skin
of his carapace would be warm to my touch.
I myself
was all ears - sometimes what we hear
extends
beyond the ossicles. My bones and guts
vibrated
like a drum taking me back to when
I’d
played The Elephant in Carnival of the Animals.
Rebecca
Gethin
Dear Mr Songwriter
Apologies for bothering you
but I have a problem, an issue
that I would like you to address.
You have us singing in the rain,
setting fire to the rain,
drops keep falling on our heads
and pitter, patter down windowpanes.
There’s purple rain and November rain.
It rains until September.
It always rains on me
and on occasions, it even rains men.
You are obsessed with precipitation.
Being caught in the rain with sodden clothes
clinging to shivering body is not a good look.
So this is my heartfelt request, Mr S.
Next time you need a meteorological metaphor
do please write about something more uplifting…
but maybe not the sun because
sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.
Rosalind Adam
Campanology
It’s music that remains the longest time.
The melodies, the songs from yesteryear,
the notes, the chords; they ring a bell, they chime
with memories, locked deep within her mind.
And so, we hum and croon into her ear
the music, that remains the longest time.
She sings along to Elvis in his prime,
her ‘devil in disguising’ crystal-clear -
the notes, the chords; they ring a bell, they chime.
And we join in, our harmonies sublime -
for her at least; for us it keeps her near.
It’s music that remains the longest time.
And when
the music stops we’re left behind.
It starts again - and then she reappears.
The notes, the chords; they ring a bell, they chime
like lullabies, like chanted nursery rhymes,
indelible; a mark forever here.
It’s music that remains the longest time,
the notes, the chords; they ring a bell, they chime.
Deborah Roberts
Dancing Queen
To my
children I bequeath
no
mobile home in Bournemouth,
no
luxury yacht, no reams of cash, no
vintage
guitar once owned by Jimi,
no
stocks and shares or diamond rings,
but this
moment, on a December night,
lights
emanating from a cheap disco ball,
dancing
onto our kitchen ceiling,
sparks
from tinsel flung over photos
of
siblings covered in cookie dough,
jumping
on sofas, our friends
huddled
in front of Machu Picchu,
euphoric;
their joy caught in freeze frame. Now,
small
hips gyrate, palms rise and open.
Powerless
to the allure of soprano tones,
we
warble, notes spilling
like the
froth of a pint of beer pulled fast,
bop with
the burbling baby held by his waist,
mimic
the sequin sway of gorgeous hair,
stifling
the fear that’s been shrieking
from
news that claws at our door.
This I
choose for my children,
this
moment which holds no space for fear:
five of
us, safe in our kitchen
with a
tambourine and ABBA,
having
the time of our lives.
Chrissie Dreier
Another
Song
His
arpeggios like clockwork keep
threading his intro’s chords.
The band joins and as they perform,
someone near the side door weeps.
Andante
his first verse eases in
like a faithless lover’s plea—
asking for one last chance again
in two-part harmony.
The
bridge and reprised chorus share
notes nicked from a gentle heart,
five words, until death us do part
wedded to his coda’s prayer.
While
that someone heard another song,
how well he played her, all along.
Mark Mansfield
Dear Peace
you are
a swallow, guided,
not like
a missile,
but by
earth’s magnetic
compass.
You battle
to be
heard
in the
madness
of war.
You turn
up year after year,
resting
in reed-beds,
returning
to a bowl-shaped
nest of
mud under my eaves.
Your
glossy black wings,
long
tail streamers flashing
like
little minim blessings.
I saw
you today, busy,
ferrying
soft grasses,
moss and
light brown
feathers
to line your nest,
your
soft musical tswit-tswit
breaking
the silence, searching
for the
right notes to pray.
Mary
Howlett
Girl
with Guitar
Her
reflection floats across
The sun
dazzled windows of the shops:
A girl
with a guitar walking
Allegro
moderato down Grafton Street,
Through
an air thick with the music
Of what
is happening: a polyphony
Of
chatterers, shrill seagulls, the toccata
Of high
heels on the cobble-lock pavement.
The
bluesy fanfare of a distant siren.
Street
music, taken by the guitar
Through
the dilated O of its single ear,
A
Harmonia Mundi to be reborn
When her
fingers touch the strings,
And her
dexterous hand draws out,
As from
a purse of music,
Diminished
chords, a melody
In a
minor mode, a perfect cadence.
Liam Aungier
TA
Craig Ltd
instruments
repaired and restored
sometimes
he works
in the
resined light
of
morning
in a
room of oak beams
violins,
violas
attentive
on the walls
younger
than expected
bearded
monastic
hands
barely moving
he
shifts
a
soundpost
the
width of a breath
gathers
new
horsehair
from the
Amur Valley
knows
time
will wait
for
maple to resonate
with the
cool Dinaric summers
of three
hundred years ago
all this
in many glimpses
as I
pass
down the
High Street
looking
into depths
quiet in
the workshop
vibration
in the well
Iain McClure
Pantoum for a Choir in Lockdown
During
lockdown we are told, ‘Stay at home.
‘No
gadding about with folks that you know;
‘You
need to stay safe – there’s no right to roam.
No
meeting in choir to sing la, te, doh.’
No
gadding about with folks that we know;
When
Thursday comes round, it’s just not the same -
No
meeting in choir to sing la, te, doh.
No fun
vocal warm ups – that’s such a shame.
When
Thursday comes round, it’s just not the same.
From
altos no ‘dits’; from basses no ‘dums’;
No fun
vocal warm ups – that’s such a shame.
No
coffee and chats with some of our chums.
From
altos no ‘dits’; from basses no ‘dums’;
No high
sopranos; for tenors no tune;
No
coffee and chats with some of our chums.
We have
to stay safe ’cos no one’s immune.
No high
sopranos; for tenors no tune;
No
baritone harmonies sounding so fine.
We have
to stay safe ’cos no-one’s immune.
No MD’s
flapping arms to keep us in time.
No
baritone harmonies sounding so fine
No
voices blending, to make beautiful sound
No MD’s
flapping arms to keep us in time.
But -
before long - the day will come round
When
we’re back as a choir, but until then
We need
to stay safe – there’s no right to roam.
So we
may meet up and sing once again,
During
lockdown we are told, ‘Stay at home’.
Malc Fritchley
Grand piano
Summer
is dying in the Edwardian house.
Window
sashes are lowered as the last wink of sun
coaxes
the music room to smile.
A
dust-rim stains the wall where once a painting
carried
visitors to a Welsh hillside, its slopes alive
with
purple heather, gorse and rain-drunk sheep.
Boxes of
books, rhyme and make-believe,
loved by
a mind that now meanders like a beck,
wait by
the front door for Oxfam.
In the
hall a brown-suited man sidesteps
the
stair lift, clipboard in hand, reports on a lifetime
of damp
patches and irritated pipes.
Outside
the garden has aged to a forest,
purple
buddleias battle with hydrangeas,
ground
elder and poppies thrive in flowerbeds.
All this
as a girl in red leggings, skin honeyed
by a
childhood in Argentinian sun, settles
at a
grand piano, plays the right hand of Für Elise,
to her
grandmother, for the first and last time.
Estelle Price
Contributors
Rosalind
Adam, a Leicester writer, has had over 20 poems published in a variety of
magazines including Allegro, London Grip, Amethyst and Under the
Radar. In 2018 she won the G.S. Fraser prize for poetry and was awarded a
distinction for her MA in Creative Writing at The University of Leicester.
Liam Aungier works in Dublin as a Civil Servant and has had poems
published in The Irish Times, The SHOp, Cyphers, and previously in the Poetry
Ireland Review. His second collection, Landfall, was published
by Revival Press in 2025.
Charles Barker-Benfield is a new phase poet. He retired in 2023 and
started writing poetry again after a gap of many years, including on nature,
war, and mortality.
Neil Beardmore has published in Acumen, Allegro, Orbis, Cannon’s
Mouth, Sarasvati and reads at venues including the St Ives Festival. 2023
saw the publication of his selection: Making Cars and Blues Art Guitars. To
celebrate 60 years of Milton Keynes he is preparing a book about the place.
See neilbeardmore.com
Maggie Davison, a Northumberland poet, has won the Slipstream Poets and
Edward Thomas Fellowship competitions and has been published in many print and
online platforms, including Orbis, Dreich, 14 Magazine, Dream Catcher,
Poetry Wivenhoe, Whispering Wisdom and the Dark Poets Club. She was
recently a featured poet with Explore York.
Chrissie Dreier is a poet from Oxford whose poetry has been shortlisted
for the Bridport Poetry Prize, the Magma Poetry competition, the Hippocrates
Prize and Ver Poetry Prize, and longlisted in the Rialto Nature and Place
Competition. She is currently working on her first pamphlet.
Ru
Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer and poet. Her poems
have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry
Northwest, and elsewhere. Her published works include Bon
Courage: Essays On Citizenship, Inheritance, And A Creative Life, Sleeping
Alone:Stories, and the widely translated novel On Sal Mal Lane.
Malc Fritchley's writing focus shifted to poetry around the time of
Covid. He has had poems published in Reach Poetry, Orbis,
and The Dawntreader and been shortlisted by King Lear Prizes. He
also recently discovered unexpectedly that he enjoyed performing his
poetry in public.
Rebecca Gethin has written 5 poetry publications and 2 novels.
She was a Hawthornden Fellow and a Poetry School tutor. Her poems are
widely published in various magazines and anthologies. She won the first
Coast to Coast pamphlet competition with Messages.
Ken
Hada's latest collection is Nexus (Turning Plow Press, 2026). His
work has been awarded by The National Western Heritage Museum, The SCMLA Prize
for Poetry, Western Writers of America and The Oklahoma Center for the Book.
Mary Howlett lives in Ireland. She is published in Southword, Dodging
The Rain, Frogmore Papers, The Honest Ulsterman, Drawn to the Light Press, Poem
Alone, Steel Jackdaw, Swerve Magazine, Poetry Bus 12, The Get Real, Allegro,
N&H Journal, Amethyst Review and Fig Tree. She is Highly
Commended in various competitions.
David Anson Lee is a physician, philosopher, and poet
born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and based in Texas.
His work explores intersections of medicine, music, memory, and form. He has
been widely published in literary journals including Ink Sweat & Tears,
Eunoia Review, and The Orchards.
Iain McClure, originally from the North of Ireland, now living in
England, was once the drummer in a (rightly unsigned) blues-rock band. A
prize-winning poet published in the UK and USA, he often writes about music,
from minimalism to jazz, and the links between Ginger Baker's polyrhythms and
spiralling daisies.
Mark Mansfield’s poems have appeared in Abridged, Anthropocene,
Bayou, The High Window, Magma, Measure, morphrog, A New Ulster, Obsessed
with Pipework, Orbis, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, and elsewhere. He
has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Currently, he lives in upstate New
York.
JK
Miller is a former third grade teacher living on the edge of cornfields. He
has two published poetry chapbooks and his poems have appeared in many literary
journals. He plays the harmonica. Recently he completed a bicycle ride from his
house to his son's house, to see his newborn grandson. It was 1,335 miles.
Navratra, from Jaipur, India, is a writer who loves exploring the world
of home, relationships, and emotions through her stories and poems. Her work
has appeared in publications like FemAsia Magazine, Basset Hound Press,
and Madras Courier. She writes whenever inspiration strikes, letting her
thoughts and feelings flow onto the page.
Estelle Price is a UK poet who has won several poetry competitions
including the 2023 Mairtín Crawford Award. She was published in 2022 by Nine
Arches Press in Primers 6. Poems have been published in the Iowa Review. Before
she was a poet she was a lawyer, classicist, charity worker.
Deborah Roberts worked for many years in Human Resources. She is
now studying for a BA in English Literature and Creative
Writing, rediscovering a passion for poetry. When she’s not studying or
writing, she spends her time apologising to fellow dog walkers for her
very barky pooch.
Sara
Stegen is a Dutch
poet and non-fiction author who writes about land, family, nature, and
neurodivergence. Home is a boulder-clay ridge in the northern Netherlands where
her bike shed contains 8 bicycles and where she is working on a memoir about apples and
autism and her first poetry collection.
Phil Vernon lives in Kent. He recently retired after
an international peacebuilding and humanitarian career. His third poetry
collection is Guerrilla Country (Flight of the Dragonfly
Press, 2024). www.philvernon.net
Louise Warren has published five poetry collections A Child’s
Last Picture of the Zoo In the scullery with John
Keats Cinnamon Press . John Dust V. Press Sometime in
a Churchyard, Paekakariki Press and most recently Poison Tuba
Press 2024. In 2018 she won first prize in the Prole Laureate Poetry
Competition.
Juliet Wilson is an adult education tutor and
conservation volunteer based in Edinburgh. Her poetry and short stories have
been widely published and she can be found in various online places as Crafty
Green Poet.
